The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Environmental Politics (OXFORD HANDBOOKS SERIES) 0197515037, 9780197515037

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The Oxford Handbook of

COMPARATIVE ENVIRONMENTAL POLITICS

The Oxford Handbook of

COMPARATIVE ENVIRONMENTAL POLITICS Edited by

J E A N N I E S OW E R S STAC Y D. VA N D EV E E R and

E R I KA W E I N T HA L

Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries. Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America. © Oxford University Press 2023 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above. You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer. Library of Congress Control Number: 2022049850 ISBN 978–​0–​19–​751503–​7 DOI: 10.1093/​oxfordhb/​9780197515037.001.0001 Printed by Integrated Books International, United States of America

Contents

 About the Contributors 

Introduction: The Scope and Diversity of Comparative   Environmental Politics  Jeannie Sowers, Stacy D. VanDeveer, and Erika Weinthal

xi

1

PA RT I   STAT E S A N D E N V I RON M E N TA L P OL IC I E S I N C OM PA R AT I V E P E R SP E C T I V E 1. The Environmental State and Its Limits  James Meadowcroft

23

2. California’s Environmental Policy Leadership  David Vogel

43

3. Assessing 30 Years of Neoliberal Environmental Management in Chile: Effective, Democratic or Neither?  Javiera Barandiarán

57

4. Environment and Development: Crossing the Divide Between Global South and Global North  Kathryn Hochstetler

81

5. National Climate Mitigation Policy in Europe  Paul Tobin and Louise Wylie

93

6. Governing Flood and Climate Risks in the Netherlands and Hungary: A Comparative Analysis  Elizabeth A. Albright

109

7. The Politics of Climate Disasters, Social Inequality, and Perceptions of Government Assistance  Isabella Alcañiz and Ana Ivelisse Sanchez-​Rivera

127

vi   Contents

8. Implementation of International Environmental Law: A Comparative Perspective  Maria Ivanova, Natalia Escobar-​Pemberthy, Anna Dubrova, and Candace Famiglietti 9. Comparative International Fisheries Management  Elizabeth R. DeSombre

141

166

PA RT I I   M E T HOD S A N D C ON C E P T UA L C ON SI DE R AT ION S 10. Interpretive Methodologies, Quantitative Methods, and Comparative Environmental Politics  J. Samuel Barkin, V. Miranda Chase, and Saskia van Wees

187

11. Ethnography in Comparative Environmental Politics: Insights from the Water and Waste Fields  Raul Pacheco-​Vega

200

12. An Intersectional Exploration of Climate Institutions  Annica Kronsell, Gunnhildur Lily Magnusdottir, Nanna Rask, and Benedict E. Singleton 13. Gender and Comparative Environmental Politics: Examining Population Debates Through Gender Lenses  Nicole Detraz

223

240

PA RT I I I   M OV E M E N T S A N D AC T I V I SM 14. Environmental Justice, Climate Justice, and Animal Liberation Movements: Confronting the Problems of Social Difference  David N. Pellow

263

15. Civil Society, Networks, and Contention Around Environmental Issues  Jen Iris Allan and Jennifer Hadden

281

16. Time and Place in Climate Activism: Three Urgency-​Induced Debates  Joost de Moor

299

Contents   vii

17. The Comparative Politics of Environmental Activism in Russia: Strategic Adaptation to Authoritarianism  Laura A. Henry 18. Anglo Fears: Rejection of Climate Change and Anglo Anxiety  Peter J. Jacques 19. Civil Disobedience, Sabotage, and Violence in US Environmental Activism  Joseph M. Brown

317 335

356

PA RT I V   M A R K E T S A N D F I R M S I N C OM PA R AT I V E E N V I RON M E N TA L P OL I T IC S 20. Territory, Private Authority, and Rights: The Place of Land Rights in Sustainable Agriculture and Forest Certification  Tim Bartley

377

21. Comparing Voluntary Sustainability Standards: Blindspots, Biases, and Pathways Forward  Hamish van der Ven

398

22. Continuity and Change in Carbon Market Politics  Carley Chavara, Christian Elliott, Matthew Hoffmann, and Matthew Paterson

417

PA RT V   E N V I RON M E N TA L J U S T IC E A N D R IG H T S 23. The Comparative Politics of Environmental Justice  Kemi Fuentes-George

437

24. Critical Perspectives on Representation, Equity, and Rights: Developing a Comparative Politics of Environmental Justice  Kimberly R. Marion Suiseeya

456

25. Globalization of Environmental Justice: A Framework for Comparative Research  Prakash Kashwan

475

viii   Contents

26. Rights of Nature: Institutions, Law, and Policy for Sustainable Development  Craig M. Kauffman

499

27. Implementing Environmental Rights: Reviewing the Evidence from Research and Practice  Joshua C. Gellers and Chris Jeffords

518

28. Gendering the Human Right to Water in the Context of Sustainable Development  Farhana Sultana

538

PA RT V I   NAT U R A L R E S OU RC E S A N D P OL I T IC A L E C ON OM Y 29. Green Industrial Policy in Comparative Perspective: Supporting Renewable Energy Industry Development in Emerging Economies  Joanna I. Lewis

559

30. Natural Resources and the Politics of Distribution  Mohannad Al-​Suwaidan and Nimah Mazaheri

577

31. Temporality, Limited Statehood, and Africa’s Abandoned Mines  W. R. Nadège Compaoré and Nathan Andrews

592

32. Illegal Wildlife Trade in the Mekong: The Interplay of Actors, Legal Governance, and Political Economy  Songkhun Nillasithanukroh, Ekta Patel, Edmund Malesky, and Erika Weinthal

609

PA RT V I I   T H E P OL I T IC S OF E N E RG Y T R A N SI T ION S 33. Fracked Taxpayers and Communities: Shale Economics in the US and Argentina  Shanti Gamper-​Rabindran

633

34. Renewable Energy, Energy Poverty, and Climate Change: Opportunities and (Many) Challenges  Michaël Aklin

658

Contents   ix

35. Renewable Energy Supply Chains and the Just Transition  Dustin Mulvaney 36. The Rise and Fall of Fossil Fuels: Two Moments in the Energy History of the Middle East and Their Global Consequences  Dan Rabinowitz

679

696

PA RT V I I I   C I T I E S A N D SU STA I NA B I L I T Y 37. Cities and the Environment in Africa: An Agency-​Centered Research Agenda  Christopher Gore

711

38. Reclaiming the Circular Economy: Informal Work and Grassroots Power  Manisha Anantharaman

730

39. Urban Climate Adaptation: Discontents and Alternative Politics  Eric Chu and Linda Shi

751

PA RT I X   E N V I RON M E N T S , R E S OU RC E S , A N D V IOL E N C E 40. War and Environmental Politics: A Comparative Perspective  Jeannie Sowers and Erika Weinthal

775

41. Climate and Conflict: Lessons from the Syria Case  Marwa Daoudy

797

42. The Integration of Conservation and Security: Political Ecologies of Violence and the Illegal Wildlife Trade  Rosaleen Duffy and Francis Massé

814

Index 

831

About the Contributors

Michaël Aklin, Department of Political Science, University of Pittsburgh Elizabeth A. Albright, Nicholas School of the Environment, Duke University Isabella Alcañiz, Department of Government and Politics, University of Maryland Jen Iris Allan, School of Law and Politics, Cardiff University Mohannad Al-​Suwaidan, The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University Manisha Anantharaman, Justice, Community, and Leadership, Saint Mary’s College of California Nathan Andrews, Department of Political Science, McMaster University Javiera Barandiarán, Department of Global Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara J. Samuel Barkin, Department of Conflict Resolution, Human Security, and Global Governance, University of Massachusetts Boston Tim Bartley, Department of Sociology, Washington University in St. Louis Joseph M. Brown, Department of Political Science, University of Massachusetts Boston V. Miranda Chase, Department of Political Science, San Diego State University Carley Chavara, Department of Political Science, University of Toronto Eric Chu, Department of Human Ecology, University of California Davis Marwa Daoudy, Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University Joost de Moor, Department of Political Science, Stockholm University Elizabeth R. DeSombre, Department of Environmental Studies, Wellesley College Nicole Detraz, Department of Political Science, University of Memphis Anna Dubrova, Department of Conflict Resolution, Human Security, and Global Governance, University of Massachusetts Boston Rosaleen Duffy, Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Sheffield Christian Elliott, Department of Political Science, University of Toronto Natalia Escobar-​Pemberthy, Department of International Business, Universidad EAFIT

xii   About the Contributors Candace Famiglietti, Department of Conflict Resolution, Human Security, and Global Governance, University of Massachusetts Boston Kemi ​Fuentes-George, Department of Political Science & Environmental Studies, Middlebury College Shanti Gamper-​Rabindran, Graduate School of Public and International Affairs, University of Pittsburgh Joshua C. Gellers, Department of Political Science and Public Administration, University of North Florida Christopher Gore, Department of Politics and Public Administration, Toronto Metropolitan University Jennifer Hadden, Department of Government and Politics, University of Maryland Laura A. Henry, Department of Government and Legal Studies, Bowdoin College Kathryn Hochstetler, Department of International Development and Political Science, London School of Economics Matthew Hoffmann, Department of Political Science, University of Toronto Maria Ivanova, School of Public Policy and Urban Affairs, Northeastern University Peter J. Jacques, School of Politics, Security, and International Affairs, University of Central Florida Chris Jeffords, Department of Economics, Indiana University of Pennsylvania Prakash Kashwan, Environmental Studies Program, Brandeis University Craig M. Kauffman, Department of Political Science, University of Oregon Annica Kronsell, School of Global Studies, Gothenburg University Joanna I. Lewis, Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University Gunnhildur Lily Magnusdottir, Department of Political Science, Malmö University Edmund Malesky, Department of Political Science, Duke University Francis Massé, Department of Geography and Environmental Sciences, Northumbria University Nimah Mazaheri, Department of Political Science, Tufts University James Meadowcroft, Department of Political Science, Carleton University, Canada Dustin Mulvaney, Environmental Studies Department, San José State University W. R. Nadège Compaoré, Department of Political Science, University of Toronto Mississauga Songkhun Nillasithanukroh, Department of Political Science, Duke University

About the Contributors    xiii Raul Pacheco-​Vega, Methods Lab, Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales (FLACSO) Sede México Ekta Patel, Nicholas School of the Environment/​Sanford School of Public Policy, Duke University Matthew Paterson, Department of Politics, University of Manchester David N. Pellow, Department of Environmental Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara Dan Rabinowitz, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Tel-​Aviv University Nanna Rask, School of Global Studies, University of Gothenburg Ana Ivelisse Sanchez-​Rivera, Department of Government and Politics, University of Maryland Linda Shi, Department of City and Regional Planning, Cornell University Benedict E. Singleton, School of Global Studies, University of Gothenburg Jeannie Sowers, Department of Political Science, University of New Hampshire Kimberly R. Marion Suiseeya, Department of Political Science, Northwestern University Farhana Sultana, Department of Geography, Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, Syracuse University Paul Tobin, Department of Politics, University of Manchester Hamish van der Ven, Department of Wood Science, University of British Columbia Stacy D. VanDeveer, Department of Conflict Resolution, Human Security, and Global Governance, University of Massachusetts Boston Saskia van Wees, Department of Political Science, University of Florida David Vogel, Department of Political Science, Haas School of Business, UC Berkeley, California Erika Weinthal, Nicholas School of the Environment, Duke University Louise Wylie, Department of Politics, University of Manchester

Introdu c t i on

The Scope and Diversity of Comparative Environmental Politics Jeannie Sowers, Stacy D. VanDeveer, and Erika Weinthal Comparative environmental politics (CEP) is a vibrant field of scholarship and practice that addresses a range of environmental issues facing communities, non-​state actors, and nation-​states. It draws not only on the disciplinary study of politics and policy but, as this volume shows, also is enriched by interdisciplinary insights from anthropology, geography, sociology, law, and development studies. In contrast to global environmental politics, comparative environmental politics has a broader geographic and thematic reach, drawing upon experiences of most of the world’s population with diverse environmental issues. The intensifying climate crisis and the deepening burden of pollution and ecological destruction has accentuated structural inequalities associated with poverty, gender, caste, race, and region. This volume thus reflects increased scholarly interest in environmental rights, environmental mobilization and movements, and non-​state forms of political engagement. Moreover, contestation and regulation of environmental issues can no longer be relegated to the margins of formal politics anywhere. As James Meadowcroft’s contribution to this volume notes, some version of the “environmental state” is here to stay, and the governance of environmental issues is increasingly recognized as central to political economy, political theory, political behavior, and political institutions. In the decade since Steinberg and VanDeveer (2012) published Comparative Environmental Politics (MIT Press), CEP scholarship has embraced new questions and methods even as it seeks to address enduring questions in the broader field of comparative politics. This volume brings together cutting-​edge research that tackles important environmental issues around the world using a range of theoretical and methodological approaches. We include leading scholars in particular areas of research and include new voices to offer innovative perspectives from multiple disciplines on emerging challenges and debates in the field of CEP. The chapter authors seek to capture current controversies and debates in their areas of interest and to make an original argument about how their work fits more broadly into the study of CEP. The aims of this volume are two-​fold: to illustrate some of the main theoretical debates and critical thematic issues that have emerged in the field and to include a

2    Jeannie Sowers, Stacy D. VanDeveer, and Erika Weinthal broad cross-​section of scholars. All the chapters, regardless of their country focus or comparative research design, take on the challenging task of synthesizing what they see as the state of art in their respective thematic areas and indicating where additional research could yield fruitful inquiry.

Scope and Method in Comparative Environmental Politics Comparative politics is characterized by the enduring importance of domestic institutions, actors, and political processes, and situates these in broader transnational and regional developments. In contrast to some of the dominant framings in international relations, which emphasize the homogenizing impacts of the global economy and global governance, comparative politics is concerned with examining variation and diversity as well as commonalities. Methods and approaches employed in the field are equally diverse, in ongoing conversation with ​a variety of social science traditions and developments. The contributors to this volume illustrate the diverse strands that characterize the field of comparative politics. Some authors focus on an in-​depth case study of a single country or subnational jurisdiction (such as a US state), drawing on significant fieldwork and in-​ depth knowledge of domestic political dynamics and state–​society relations. This method has long generated some of the most insightful research in comparative politics and is well represented in this volume in the chapters by David Vogel on California’s environmental leadership, Javiera Barandiarán on the effects of Chile’s neoliberalism on environmental governance, Laura Henry on the effects of Russia’s turn to authoritarianism on environmental activism, Marwa Daoudy on drought and conflict in Syria, Joseph Brown on strategies of civil disobedience in US environmentalism, and Isabella Alcañiz and Ana Ivelisse Sanchez-​ Rivera exploring whom voters blame in the wake of Hurricane Maria’s devastating impacts on Puerto Rico. Other chapters employ an explicitly comparative framework across two or more political contexts to explain causes of variation in environmental policy formation, organizational capacity, public opinion, and social movement advocacy. These include Christopher Gore’s chapter on urban environmental politics in several African cities, Shanti Gamper-​Rabindran’s chapter on fracking in the United States and Argentina, Songkhun Nilliasithanukroh et al. on illegal wildlife trade in the Mekong Basin countries, Elizabeth Albright’s contribution comparing flood risk management in the Netherlands and Hungary, Prakash Kashwan’s comparison of advocacy for environmental justice in India and the United States, and the intersectional analysis of four Swedish governmental agencies that include mandates to address climate change by Annica Kronsell et al. Other authors examine comparative environmental performance across a much broader number of cases. These range from looking at the implementation of climate mitigation policies across European countries, as in the chapter by Paul Tobin and Louise Wylie, to comparing the effectiveness of the approximately 20 interstate regional fisheries management organizations established for various fish stocks and marine regions in Beth

Introduction   3 DeSombre’s chapter. Maria Ivanova et al. use a dataset of 13 countries that includes cases from the Global North and the Global South to analyze variation in implementing multilateral environmental treaties and, in doing so, undermine notions that environmental performance is confined to high-​income countries. In addition, Peter Jacques’s contribution explores why and how climate science denialism remains so robust in “Anglo” countries such as Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Yet other chapters draw on traditions of political theory, gender theory, and human rights to explore normative claims and new ways to conceive of environmental rights and obligations to humans and non-​humans. David Pellow, for instance, argues that climate, environment, and animal liberation movements can engage in more deeply intersectional practice by emulating the radical institutional reforms called for by anti-​racism and abolitionist movements. Nicole Detraz uses a gender lens to explore discourses associated with debates about the global human population as they play out in the US context, seeking to problematize and interrogate them. Farhana Sultana argues that a gender perspective is essential to understand the various dimensions of the human right to water. Eric Chu and Linda Shi critique dominant climate adaptation discourses in urban planning, providing examples of alternatives that would more adequately meld climate adaptation and environmental justice concerns. The study of CEP, as shown above, is not limited to scholars working in the discipline of political science. Indeed, the field draws on the much broader sweep of environmental studies to ask questions about power, governance, and distribution of human welfare with insights from anthropology, geology, urban studies, and sociology. The contributions of these disciplines in broadening the contours of environmental politics include the chapters by Christopher Gore on urban environmental anthropology, Manisha Anantharaman on ethnographies of informal work and the circular economy in India, and Raul Pacheco-​Vega on employing ethnographic methods to study water and waste. Several chapters in this volume call for more consideration of underutilized approaches in both method and methodology. Notably, the chapter by Barkin et al. challenges CEP scholars to engage in more “methodological creativity” by employing interpretive epistemology alongside quantitative methods, a relatively rare combination in the field. In exploring trends over the past decade, the Handbook highlights the growth in scholarship about a broader range of countries and regions than the initial focus on Europe and the United States, with growth in coverage of “developing” countries, authoritarian states, and the Global South. Important work on globally influential countries such as Brazil, China, South Africa, and India is growing rapidly, as is work that compares cases in the Global South and grapples thematically with issues of great salience to a broader range of countries. In this volume, the expanded geographic scope is well captured in contributions that draw on extensive fieldwork and field knowledge of non-​Western contexts. These include the chapters by Barandiarán on Chile, Alcañiz and Sanchez-​Rivera on Puerto Rico, Pacheco-​Vega on Mexico, Henry on Russia, Kashwan on India, Kauffman on Ecuador, al-​Suwaidan and Mazaheri on rentier states in the Persian Gulf, also examined in the chapter by Rabinowitz, Songhkhun et al. on the Mekong Basin, Gore on African cities, Anantharaman on India, Daoudy on Syria, and Duffy and Massé on South Africa. This trend is also seen in comparative studies of energy transitions and industrial policy in low-​ and middle-​income countries (e.g., Hochstetler 2021; Lewis, this volume).

4    Jeannie Sowers, Stacy D. VanDeveer, and Erika Weinthal Furthermore, comparative regional studies, for example of Africa and Latin America, are also on the rise. Beyond simply including more of the world’s states and societies in CEP scholarship, however, this work is increasingly recognized as theory-​generating and not just testing theoretical propositions developed elsewhere. In other words, conceptual and theoretical frameworks constructed and developed mostly via social science research in and about Europe and North America are being challenged, augmented, or replaced by scholarship about the rest of the world. For example, Kate Neville’s (2021) work develops a framework for understanding contestation and resistance to energy projects based on her research in Kenya’s Tana Delta and Canada’s Yukon and deploying scholarship from social mobilization theories and political economy. Kathy Hochstetler’s book (2021) analyzes renewable energy outcomes across countries based on her comparative work on Brazil and South Africa. Hochstetler’s contribution to this volume argues that CEP scholarship should continue to interrogate and de-​center the North–​South binary in comparative politics scholarship. She also argues that environmental politics scholars should engage more with the classic questions and analytical tools of comparative politics scholarship. The Handbook also finds new trends in CEP scholarship, particularly in more explicit attention to the comparative study of environmental injustice and intersectional inequities. Environmental hazards are often distributed unequally, reflecting entrenched relationships of inequality and exclusion based on class, caste, racial, gender, citizenship, tribal, and Indigenous ascriptions (see contributions by Compaoré and Andrews, Aklin and Bartley, for example). The unequal distribution of environmental hazards and increased vulnerability to these hazards based on lack of adequate access to healthcare, basic services, and civic representation, among other factors, can be understood as a form of “slow violence” (Nixon 2011). These injustices include colonial origins of land and biodiversity conservation (e.g. chapters by Duffy and Massé, and Fuentes-​George), the siting of landfills near communities of color, and lack of access to clean water and air (Marion Suiseeya). Meanwhile Sowers and Weinthal’s chapter draws our attention to the many human rights violations from the growing inclination of military combatants to target and destroy civilian and environmental infrastructure. Globally, the field of environmental justice and rights has examined the role of environmental defenders and activists in protecting the environment and community livelihoods. It has also explored new forms of law and jurisprudence that call into questions patterns of economic growth and consumption, putting forward the rights of nature. Gellers and Jeffords’s contribution seeks to take stock of evidence about whether and under what conditions the increasingly diverse set of “environmental rights” produce meaningful outcomes in implementation. The question of environmental injustice extends beyond simply that of humans to non-​humans. Because politics, broadly understood, is usually considered a domain of collective human action, political science has not embraced animals, plants, insects, and other nonhumans as subjects and agents, as an influential strand of environmental history has done. David Pellow’s chapter argues that scholars and activists should consider how to build upon discursive and conceptual linkages between movements for racial, environmental, climate, and animal justice. The overlaps between considerations of non-​ humans, along with claims for the “rights of nature” and struggles against environmental racism are well articulated in the chapters by Kemi Fuentes-​George and Craig Kauffman. These chapters outline an important set of questions for CEP scholars moving forward.

Introduction   5 Dustin Mulvaney’s contribution links these discussions and CEP research to the growing “just energy transitions” literature. The remainder of this chapter introduces the major themes of each section by putting the chapters within it in dialogue with each other. We also note where specific chapters speak to important issues raised in other sections.

Part I:  States, Domestic Political Institutions, and Policymaking The nation-​state is the traditional locus of environmental policymaking, and Part I takes stock of advances in studies of state policy and practice. The chapters explore the growth and scope of environmental regulation in various countries, the turn to neoliberalism, and recent rollbacks in environmental regulation under right-​populist regimes, as in Chile. The contributions also examine subnational variation in effectiveness, particularly in federal systems, and the impact of domestic politics on broader environmental issues and the design and implementation of international environmental regimes. Variations in state capacity and legacies of state formation shape both supranational and subnational forms of environmental governance. James Meadowcroft’s “The Environmental State and Its Limits” asks us to reflect on the accomplishments, the very demonstrable limits, and the continuing potential of decades of effort to “green” states since the 1960s. Air pollution issues and regulation in wealthier countries offer illustrative examples of substantial environmental achievements in many countries, alongside persistent failures to grapple with the ecological and human health challenges. Meadowcroft traces the construction of contemporary understandings of the “environment” and the parallel idea that states are responsible for various forms of environmental protection through attempts to regulate various undesirable outcomes. While such regulation is often “ratcheted up” over time, involving changing scientific and technical understandings alongside political activism and advocacy, the limits of this approach are manifest in the long list of current air pollution-​related environmental challenges. Meadowcroft challenges researchers and practitioners to ask questions about the potential of environmental states to move beyond regulating adverse impacts toward a focus on transforming production and consumption in more sustainable directions. David Vogel’s chapter, “California’s Environmental Policy Leadership,” focuses on one of the globe’s leading environmental policy entities: the US state of California. He explores several dimensions of California’s environmental leadership and the impact of this leadership well beyond California’s borders, with particular attention to energy, climate change, air pollution, and chemicals regulation. This work connects the California “case” to US and comparative environmental federalism and adds to scholarship comparing national and subnational public sector leaders and political processes around the globe (e,g., Selin and VanDeveer 2015). Javiera Barandiarán’s contribution takes us to Chile, focusing on how neoliberal ideas, assumptions, and goals are embedded in environmental policies through state institutions and constitutional provisions. Her work, which deploys scholarship from the

6    Jeannie Sowers, Stacy D. VanDeveer, and Erika Weinthal interdisciplinary field of science and technology studies, explores relationships between the state, science, society, and nature—​in part via attention to markets for scientific knowledge and the persistent impacts on the credibility and perceived independence of scientific knowledge creation engendered by neoliberal policies. Barandiaran contrasts Chile’s neoliberal constitutional principles, and the neoliberal democracy’s “umpire state” these helped create, with Ecuador’s 2008 constitutional reforms that attempt to center Indigenous-​ informed concepts of “good living.” She calls for more research attention to diverse civic epistemologies institutionalized in states and societies and what impacts these have on environmental rights, policies, and the organization and influence of scientific knowledge. The next contribution, “National Climate Mitigation Policy in Europe” by Paul Tobin and Louise Wylie, focuses on the well-​studied and dynamic area of European climate politics. They note that Europe’s reputation for climate change policy leadership often masks huge variance in stringency, content, consistency, and impacts of national climate change policies across European states. Furthermore, a series of political, economic, and public health crises in Europe since 2010 differentially impacted national climate policymaking. They argue that the frequent focus on climate leaders—​and the simple notion that other states are laggards—​obscures substantial political variance and complexity. It also hides the unequal impacts of climate change on marginalized populations and obscures the host of actors beyond the state engaged in climate policymaking. Kathryn Hochstetler’s chapter takes the critique of simplistic binaries between environmental leaders and laggards far beyond Europe. She argues that the persistent division in much environmental politics scholarship between countries in the Global South and the Global North does not serve well either the study of the environment or of comparative politics. A small number of advanced industrialized countries still dominate the environmental literature, while the vast diversity of environmental ambitions, outcomes, and politics in the Global South remains understudied. As she argues, “The understudy of most of the world’s countries, most of which are developing countries, and the understudy of critical comparative politics topics in them means that we too often work with negative concepts once we move outside the advanced industrialized world.” Ascribed deficits in state capacity, financing, and leadership all too often figure in lieu of robust comparative analysis of developing countries. Moreover, the conceptual divide between North and South narrows research agendas in both. Many environmental studies of the Global South continue to focus on such topics as conservation and natural resources rather than exploring the politics of pressing environmental issues regarding cities, service provision, sanitation, and the political system more broadly, although this is changing as some of the chapters in the volume attest. Moreover, studies in and of the Global South increasingly figure prominently in the comparative scholarship on environmental movements and rights, as also demonstrated in the Handbook. Hochstetler further notes that moving beyond and away from assuming a North–​South conceptual divide enables comparative scholarship on the rise of populist parties, democratic backsliding, and political polarization that characterize polities such as the United States, Brazil, Hungary, and Turkey. The next two chapters analyze how policy responses to natural disasters—​floods and hurricanes—​are shaped by both domestic and transnational factors. Elizabeth Albright’s contribution is a historically informed comparative assessment of climate and flood risk management in the Netherlands and Hungary. Despite substantial differences in geography and political history and institutions, she finds substantial similarities between the

Introduction   7 two states’ approaches as both move to reconceptualize and manage flood risks through climate change adaptation lenses. In fact, catastrophic flooding in both countries in the 2000s seems to have pushed states in similar discursive and policy directions and produced similar challenges in terms of reforming and integrating policy approaches across a host of domestic institutions. She also finds barriers to civil society engagement in these policy areas in both countries. Isabella Alcañiz and Ana Ivelissse Sanchez-​Rivera’s chapter, “Climate Disasters, Inequality and Perceptions of Government Assistance,” focuses on the question of who citizens believe is responsible for post-​disaster relief and the failures in relief and recovery after a disaster. This focus on post-​disaster responsibility attribution draws on experiences following three damaging hurricanes in 2017, with a particular focus on the aftermath of Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico. The chapter, moreover, shows that additional research is needed to understand the comparative politics of climate disasters, given the likely influence of governance structures, partisanship, ideology, and social and economic inequity. The last two chapters in this section explore how international and regional environmental governance is shaped by domestic capacities and institutional arrangements. Maria Ivanova and her coauthors focus the comparative analysis on states’ implementation of the multilateral environmental agreements (MEAs) they have signed and ratified. The chapter assesses implementation efforts in 13 countries, from the Global North and the Global South, related to four MEAs focused on hazardous waste, persistent organic pollutants, wetlands, and trade in endangered species. Their analysis deploys a database index of MEA implementation that includes information about measures taken by states (and reported by states) regarding national policies, regional collaboration, and data collection and management. Their work demonstrates that, contrary to oft-​seen generalizations about countries in the Global South, several such countries perform extremely well—​including Rwanda and Vietnam. The authors argue that there is substantial, often overlooked, environmental leadership potential among states in the Global South. Beth DeSombre’s chapter applies comparative analysis to interstate organizations called regional fisheries management organizations (RFMOs). About 20 RFMOs have been negotiated by states to improve the management of high seas fisheries (fisheries that otherwise are beyond state jurisdiction). Some RFMOs focus on specific fish, such as tuna, halibut, or pollock, in a particular oceanic region (e.g., the Pacific or the Bering Sea), while others seek to regulate multiple fisheries for a region (such as the Mediterranean). The organizations vary in terms of the organization of scientific knowledge, voting procedures, decision rules, monitoring, and enforcement processes. As DeSombre outlines, RFMO regulatory variation is substantial, as is the effectiveness of said regulation across RFMOs.

Part II:  Methods and Conceptual Considerations Since CEP scholars embrace a wide array of qualitative and quantitative methodological choices, we have included a section in the Handbook that focuses specifically on

8    Jeannie Sowers, Stacy D. VanDeveer, and Erika Weinthal methods to illuminate the rich methodological diversity and pluralism of the field. Methods used by CEP scholars range from ethnographic field research and archival studies to network analysis and large-​N statistical studies. Increasingly, research is carried out in collaboration and partnership with communities, as described by many of the chapters on environmental justice and Indigenous rights. The chapters in the Handbook highlight the broad array of methods deployed to tackle questions relevant to the field of CEP. The chapter by J. Samuel Barkin, V. Miranda Chase, and Saskia van Wees argues that CEP should interrogate the common assumption that quantitative methods are associated with comparative inference questions while interpretive questions are associated with qualitative methods. These methodological associations, they argue, simply do not have a robust epistemological basis. The chapter, “Interpretive Methodologies, Quantitative Methods and Comparative Environmental Politics,” offers two illustrative case studies of the effective use of quantitative methods for interpretive research without embedding those methods in epistemological positivism. One case examines patterns of environmental performance and foreign policy in India and China while the other explores efforts by Indigenous and traditional communities in the Amazon Basin to oppose dam construction that negatively impacts their communities. The chapter closes by offering important distinctions between method, methodology, and epistemology. Instead, it calls for approaches grounded in methodological pluralism, reflectivity, and creativity, approaches that refuse to blithely assume simplistic connections between particular methods and epistemologies. Raul Pacheco-​Vega’s contribution focuses our attention on the merits of ethnographic research methods and contributions of these to CEP, with reference to studying vulnerable communities. Pacheco-​ Vega defines ethnography as “the systematic observation of populations and communities with the intention of learning about the cultural inner workings of a societal group.” His chapter draws on research related to bottled water consumption and informal waste picking to illustrate aspects of how ethnographic research can be designed and carried out and some of the contributions it can make to CEP. Annica Kronsell and her three coauthors’ chapter embarks on an intersectional exploration of climate change institutions in Sweden. Using documentary analysis and interviews they explore how a set of social issues are understood in four Swedish governmental climate institutions—​the Environmental Protection Agency, the Traffic Agency, the Energy Agency, and the Innovation Agency. While social issues are widely recognized, they are lower in priority than technological innovation and economic incentives and difficult to integrate with these dominant orientations. The authors advocate the use of more feminist and intersectional approaches in the study of CEP. Nicole Detraz’s contribution, “Gender and Comparative Environmental Politics,” also illustrates the value of deploying gendered and feminist lenses in CEP. Detraz finds that population discourses, particularly those associated with climate change, often continue to rely on rigid gender norms and problematic assumptions about which people or communities in society are framed as environmental saviors and which as environmental problems. While population discourses may have shifted away from early, more extreme rhetorics, she calls on social scientists to critically examine their own use of language and reflect on their roles in promulgating discourses that cast marginalized women as environmental burdens, potentially impeding environmental and gender justice.

Introduction   9

Part III:  Movements and Activism in Comparative Environmental Politics Central to comparative politics and environmental politics is the study of social movements and political activism. Environmental activism, in particular, has manifested itself in many ways across the world depending on different institutional and historical contexts and has involved different coalitions of actors. CEP has long explored how people mobilize around specific issue areas and influence environmental outcomes. Regime type can, for example, influence the creation and form of environmental organizations and movements; authoritarian countries like Russia are increasingly putting restrictions on nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), forcing them to register as foreign agents (see Henry). CEP has also highlighted processes by which domestic and international environmental NGOs forge alliances to tackle environmental problems, as was the case in Kazakhstan (Weinthal and Watters 2010). In democracies, environmental movements may morph into political parties, or environmental NGOs may build coalitions with different political parties to further their agendas. Chapters in this section showcase different repertoires of action for addressing the climate crisis and environmental injustices across a range of political spaces. David Naguib Pellow’s chapter explores tensions between social movements focused on climate and environmental justice and those centered on animal liberation, two areas of CEP scholarship to which he has contributed substantially. The chapter explores warfare and militarization as phenomena and cases with common, dire short-​and long-​term consequences for humans (especially marginalized communities) and other species. Such consequences illustrate the potential common interests of environmental and multispecies justice and the creation of “deeply intersectional” movements. Pellow concludes with a fascinating discussion of what he calls “multispecies abolition democracy”—​a concept rooted in the work of W. E. B. Du Bois. “As much as prison and slavery abolitionists have articulated powerful narratives of freedom for people oppressed by institutions that cage and restrict their mobility, that political project is incomplete without a consideration of the fuller range of beings—​nonhumans—​who are also caged and consumed by structural violence,” he writes. In pushing scholars of comparative environmental politics to consider the welfare of other species, Pellow argues that abolitionists and radical reformers for racial and social justice offer a repertoire of language and practice that can inspire deeper and broader commitments to “multispecies” justice. The contribution by Jennifer Allan and Jennifer Hadden explores civil society participation in CEP, asking questions about what the growing size, diversity, and complexity of civil society networks means for scholarship. Their examination of environmental civil society over time argues that growing complexity within civil society networks, with respect to outcomes and impacts, and growing contention within civil society pose several challenges to contemporary scholarship. They highlight a need for further cross-​national comparative research that includes more of the developing world and engages debates about legitimacy and private authority, topics on which both have written extensively. Joost de Moor focuses our attention on “Time and Place in Climate Activism.” The climate movement has been fundamentally shaped by the temporality of climate change: namely, many of its consequences are or will be inevitable and irreversible, making urgency a

10    Jeannie Sowers, Stacy D. VanDeveer, and Erika Weinthal central, increasing, and driving force in climate movements. Because time is partially socially constructed, its meanings and implications are contested within climate activism, impacting aspects of politics, strategy, and goals. Time is also contextual. What might seem a future threat that can be managed by more privileged places and communities is already an unfolding catastrophe for disadvantaged communities. Framing and deploying urgency within climate politics shapes and reshapes climate activism across time, space, and scale. The chapter by Laura Henry asks how environmental NGOs continue their activism under conditions of increasing authoritarian governance. Henry’s chapter explores the Russian experience, from the 1990s post-​Soviet year through the 2020s. She explains conditions in the 1990s that allowed for the emergence of Russian environmental NGOs and charts the increasing hostility of the Russian state to these NGOs, which undermined some of the very conditions that facilitated their emergence, such as initially allowing and then banning foreign financial support. As Russia became a more centralized, authoritarian, and repressive political regime, Russian environmentalists adapted their strategies and activism, as social movement theory might predict. She thus argues that we should not overlook new forms of activism that could emerge even as previous forms are repressed or forestalled. Peter Jacques’s “Anglo Fears” focuses our attention on the comparative politics of climate denial across borders. His work demonstrates that broad-​based, politicized rejection of climate science is a well-​funded and well-​organized counter movement to oppose global and national climate movements and forestall climate mitigation policies. The chapter focuses on the United States and the United Kingdom as the most important host countries for the organized counter movement as they center and help export climate denialism in Australian, Canadian, and South African politics (among others). Jacques demonstrates that climate denialism is primarily an Anglo effort, connected to anxieties about losing long-​held privileges and ways of life. Joseph Brown’s chapter, “Civil Disobedience, Sabotage and Violence in US Environmental Activism,” explores the diversity of tactics used by environmental activists and traces debates within environmental movements about when to escalate from legal, accommodationist strategies to more confrontational, yet still largely nonviolent approaches. He draws examples primarily from the United States but also from Canada and other countries in which activists sought to halt logging in old-​growth forests, delay and cancel fossil fuel pipelines, and hinder whaling vessels. These campaigns were often characterized by broad coalitions of activists and stepwise escalation in tactics when legal and political challenges to state and corporate decision-​ making proved insufficient. Environmental movements have systematically eschewed violence, defined by Brown as causing harm to people without their consent, but smaller groups have embraced civil disobedience, nonviolent struggle, and, less frequently, sabotage (“ecotage” in the language of EarthFirst!). Violence, he shows, has been far more frequently employed against environmental activists, particularly those engaging in nonviolence civil disobedience.

Part IV:  Markets and Firms in Comparative Environmental Politics CEP has understood firms—​whether private or state-​owned—​to be central actors in generating environmental outcomes, often with a focus on corporate interests in shaping

Introduction   11 institutions. Firms and corporations often circumvent state-​led regulations and instead push for voluntary governance mechanisms, including certification schemes to promote sustainability outcomes, for example. While environmental groups have frequently promoted eco-​labels and certification schemes to expand information and transparency for consumers about products that they buy and consume, companies across sectors and countries have understood the value of such certification schemes and labels. CEP scholars have examined the use of private regulation in promoting more sustainable development and environmental management. Some comparative research has focused on what makes some third-​party certifiers more credible than others (Starobin and Weinthal 2010). Extractive industries have increasingly relied on private regulation and certification schemes, especially in countries with weak governance or where the state has opted to decentralize policy and regulation for the extractive sector. Tim Bartley, in his chapter on “Territory, Private Authority, and Rights,” examines these questions in relation to sustainable agriculture and forestry certifications. Such market-​ based solutions ask corporations rather than states to address the environmental and social impacts of corporate extractive policies. As a result, transnational sustainability standards are increasingly contested, especially when they come into conflict with Indigenous customary practices. Bartley’s chapter compares forest certification in Indonesia and China to illuminate the tension that ensues when private sustainability standards encounter other land claims and shows how these conflicts vary across different institutional contexts. The chapter furthermore highlights the application of “free and prior informed consent” for sustainability standards to Indigenous land. Hamish van der Ven, in his chapter on “Comparing Voluntary Sustainability Standards,” continues to unpack what CEP scholars know about voluntary sustainability standards as well as what is missing in our knowledge toolkit. Van der Ven undertakes a survey of the literature that compares two or more voluntary standards, covering forestry, fisheries, and organic produce. In doing so, he finds a range of methods employed in the literature as well as regional biases. Furthermore, as the comparative literature on sustainability standards fails to focus on environmental impacts, van der Ven argues for a new research agenda that will support CEP scholars in addressing the many weaknesses he identifies in the certification and standards literature. Another area of CEP research on markets and firms has to do with market-​based approaches in lieu of state-​led governance mechanisms for addressing “wicked” environmental problems. While states have voiced their collective support for climate action at the international level with the signing of the Paris Agreement, much of the actual work on addressing climate change is decentralized to states. Here, too, market-​based approaches are being introduced at the national level as a means for states to meet their Nationally Determined Contributions (NDC). Yet comparative politics tells us that states have unequal capacities to meet their NDCs as well as different institutional structures that shape their policy choices at the national level. Carley Chavara, Christian Elliot, Matthew Hoffman, and Matthew Paterson, in their chapter on “Continuity and Change in Carbon Market Politics,” investigate the variation in domestic institutions and political economies across five cases—​the European Union, China, Canada, South Korea, and Indonesia—​to explain developments in carbon markets. While the chapter highlights the transnational diffusion of policy ideas across different institutional contexts, it also suggests that strategies to decentralize climate policy through a focus on carbon markets may prevent countries from introducing more sweeping programs to reduce carbon emissions.

12    Jeannie Sowers, Stacy D. VanDeveer, and Erika Weinthal

Part V:  Environmental Justice and Rights The chapters in Part V offer a deep dive into questions of environmental justice and rights. In doing so, authors apply a comparative lens to ask, “What is environmental justice and rights”? While scholars concur that there is a “normative commitment to justice” (Marion Suiseeya) and that environmental justice is concerned with a range of issues ranging from climate justice to food justice, the chapters here investigate under what circumstances environmental rights make a difference (Gellers and Jeffords), how communities struggle to protect their communities’ well-​being and the environment (Marion Suiseeya), and claims for the rights of nature in which ecosystems are subjects with rights (Kauffman). Permeating scholarship on environmental justice and rights within CEP are calls for action to rectify the exclusions of marginalized populations from decisions about the costs and benefits of natural resource use and the siting of polluting activities that affect their communities and livelihoods. In many instances, governments in both industrialized and industrializing regions have purposefully perpetuated racist policies that incentivized environmental harms and extraction in communities of color. The CEP literature on environmental justice and rights, as highlighted in this Handbook, recognizes that justice manifests itself in different ways depending on different institutional contexts and different types of environmental struggles. In some parts of the world, communities and activists are fighting for access to clean water and air and reducing exposure to toxic wastes when large polluting industries are sited in their communities, or they are fighting to prevent the construction of large dams that could erase their ancestral homelands and cause forced displacement. In other parts of the world, activists are fighting to protect forests upon which their livelihoods depend and protect land being appropriated by large agro-​conglomerates for export crops. Frontline environmental justice communities, as Marion Suiseeya notes in Fiji, for example, are increasingly at risk from existential threats such as climate change. Authors in this handbook forcefully argue through a comparative lens that environmental justice and environmental rights require rectifying situations in which human beings are deprived of rights to clean and healthy environments. Kemi Fuentes-​George’s chapter on environmental justice highlights the comparative dimensions of justice central to environmental and social struggles across the world. While the language of environmental justice and environmental racism has manifested itself in a particular context pertaining to the struggles of largely Black and Hispanic communities in the American South, Fuentes-​George shows that these concepts help to capture broader social justice struggles and activism in New Zealand, Mexico, Jamaica, and Brazil, among other places. He draws on a wide range of cases, which include fossil fuel extraction in industrialized countries and agricultural development in the Global South, to illustrate how socioeconomically marginalized communities continue to pay the costs for a global economic system premised on economic growth and consumption. One important takeaway from Fuentes-​George’s chapter is a “critique of ‘colorblind’ mainstream environmentalism,” which has not overcome “racist and ecologically unsustainable policies.” The chapters also shed light on the different means and mechanisms by which groups pursue justice across and within different countries. Some political systems have increasingly adopted rights-​based approaches for rectifying injustices incurred by many groups

Introduction   13 over decades in which natural resources, for example, were appropriated for use by the state or the private sector. Fuentes-​George, in his chapter, proposes mechanisms to “promote and democratize information” and include “marginalized participation in policymaking” to facilitate a more just and sustainable environment. Kim Marion Suiseeya, in her chapter on “Critical Perspectives on Representation, Equity, and Rights,” adds another dimension to our understanding of environmental justice by treating environmental justice as a driver rather than as an unintended outcome of the policy and political process. Marion Suiseeya asks whether theories of environmental racism and discriminatory siting can help to explain environmental justice politics across a range of countries. Her chapter makes the case that environmental justice is a “political phenomenon,” and that environmental injustice varies by specific context. The chapter draws attention to the local dimensions of environmental injustice while demonstrating connections to a global environmental justice movement and the role of activists in building networks across different environmental justice movements. She further examines how environmental justice is operationalized and defined in practice. In like manner, Prakash Kashwan seeks to further a formal comparative environmental justice approach in his chapter on “Globalization of Environmental Justice.” Recognizing that the roots of environmental justice are widespread, Kashwan offers a systematic comparison of how environmental justice is manifested in the environmental politics of different countries. Through an in-​depth comparison of environmental justice advocacy in the United States and India, the chapter highlights the political economy of institutions in shaping the scope and form of the environmental justice movements. Several chapters discuss the expansion of basic rights to non-​human living things, as has been the case in the Ecuadorian 2008 Constitution or the 2010 Law of the Rights of Mother Earth in Bolivia (e.g. chapters by Fuentes-​George, Kauffman). Craig Kauffman’s chapter on “Rights of Nature: Institutions, Law, and Policy for Sustainable Development” expands on the legal strategy of including “Rights of Nature” provisions in domestic and international policy arenas. Through an extensive comparative review, Kauffman sheds light on the relationship between Rights of Nature (RoN) and human rights and the ensuing implications for rethinking our understanding of sustainable development as ecological sustainability. The intersectionality with Indigenous rights has profound implications for past modes of economic development, as has been the case in Ecuador, where the government canceled mining concessions to protect the Cofán’s community rights (see Kauffman). Given the proliferation of environmental rights, as documented in the chapters in this section, Gellers and Jeffords offer a roadmap forward for assessing the conditions under which environmental rights are producing meaningful outcomes. The global environmental politics field has struggled with defining effectiveness; at times effectiveness has meant solving an environmental problem, whereas at other times it has meant compliance with an international environmental regime (Young 1994). In similar manner, CEP scholars may not agree on what is meant by efficacy. Gellers and Jeffords open a discussion regarding implementation of human and non-​human rights to consider examples ranging from the impacts of expanding access to improved water sources and sanitation facilities to the practice of democratic participation. They ask CEP scholars to ponder situations where protecting rights of nature might hamper the welfare of populations if people were

14    Jeannie Sowers, Stacy D. VanDeveer, and Erika Weinthal no longer able to access a water body for drinking water, for instance. Overall, their chapter pushes the research agenda on RoN to adopt evidence-​based approaches for evaluating rights-​based forms of environmental protection. Farhana Sultana’s chapter, “Gendering the Human Right to Water in the Context of Sustainable Development,” highlights the intersectional and gendered aspects of rights and justice on the ground as applied to the human right to water. Sultana argues that rights are linked and cannot be disaggregated precisely because they are co-​constitutive of a broader set of issues pertaining to sustainable development and social justice. Sultana explains why gendering the human right to water is critical for achieving a more just and inclusive future. For example, Sultana shows how advancing women’s human right to water helps to empower women and gender minorities and how, when governments fail to facilitate these rights, they reduce other rights to dignity and well-​being for women and girls. Overall, the chapters offer new paths to address climate change, mass extinction, and environmental destruction through calls for expanding rights to marginalized communities and ecosystems, arguing that conventional environmental laws, policies, and regulations are inadequate. Most notably, these chapters highlight the insights from CEP, in which global environmental governance is increasingly rooted in the domestic politics of states. This is particularly the case because domestic law should not only address the demands and grievances of communities harmed by extractive policies, but also should recognize ecosystems as subjects in the fight to prevent global environmental destruction and the climate crisis. Rights of nature are also important in changing global economic institutions that have prioritized the commodification of nature (e.g., Kauffman’s chapter).

Part VI:  Natural Resources and Comparative Political Economy Comparative politics, and specifically the subfield of comparative political economy, has long analyzed how variations in state–​business relations impact development trajectories and the evolution of specific economic sectors. States around the world continue to actively shape the supposedly “invisible hand” of the market through a variety of industrial policies. Joanna Lewis’s chapter, “Green Industrial Policy After Paris,” examines how states pursue “green” industrial policies designed to create opportunities for the domestic production of renewable energy technologies. The rapid uptake of renewable energies is essential to limit global warming, yet industrial policies that protect domestic markets can also create distortions and inefficiencies that limit innovation and slow the uptake of new technologies. Joanna Lewis shows how many countries—​both advanced industrial economies and “developing” countries—​have experimented with a wide range of industrial policies, including local content requirements, tax and other financial incentives, domestic certifications and standards, research and development funds, and state auctions and contracts for wind and solar projects. She argues that China stands out for its early and highly effective strategy of fostering a domestic wind and solar photovoltaic (PV) industry by deploying green industrial policies, despite friction with the World Trade Organization, the United States, and foreign renewable energy companies as a result. India has proved less successful in breaking

Introduction   15 into the solar market, partly because it confronts global and domestic markets in which Chinese solar PV exports remain cheaper than other alternatives. Mohanned Al-Suwidan and Nimah Mazaheri’s chapter on “Natural Resources and the Politics of Distribution” explores the various ways in which revenues collected by states from the sale of natural resources like oil and gas can be distributed to the population. In doing so they revisit some of the assumptions made in the extensive comparative politics literature on rentier states and the so-​called resource curse. They highlight that, because of variations in state capacity, regime type, citizen needs and preferences, and resource ownership, universal prescriptions on how to manage natural resource rents are misplaced. Instead, they called for enhanced empirical comparative research on distributive policies, including sourcing more accurate data through community surveys, geospatial mapping, and close attention to the potentially adverse outcomes of policy innovations. Several chapters in this section highlight the importance of analyzing environmental issues not just across spatial scales, but also across various timescales. The chapter “Temporality, Limited Statehood, and Africa’s Abandoned Mines,” by W. R. Nadège Compaoré and Nathan Andrews, asks us to consider what happens after large, open pit mines in sub-​Saharan Africa close and are abandoned by the international firms that contracted with states to run the mines. The chapter highlights how domestic regulation, international frameworks, and contracts between international mining firms and states all “silence” the issue of mine closure by simply not including provisions for environmental accountability after the mines close. Instead, they note that firms, states, and development agencies continue to embrace mining as a development strategy despite its dismal record of social and environmental harm. The chapter by Songkhun Nillasithanukroh, Ekta Patel, Edmund Malesky, and Erika Weinthal, “Illegal Wildlife Trade in the Mekong: The Interplay of Actors, Legal Governance, and Political Economy,” analyzes the political economy of the illegal wildlife trade in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. Rather than invoking “weak enforcement” or “weak state capacity” in explaining the growing trade in wildlife despite formal laws and international treaties such as CITES, the authors analyze the political economy of wildlife supply chains (i.e., suppliers who poach and harvest wildlife, middlemen who handle transport and trade, and consumers of illegal wildlife commodities such as ivory and rhino horns). The authors examine attempts to curtail trade in illegal wildlife through outright bans, regulating hunting in protected areas, legalizing farms for captive breeding of endangered species such as turtles and crocodiles, and other means. They argue that, by addressing the incentives created by legal loopholes, jurisdictional overlap, criminalization, low wages for enforcement officers, and pervasive corruption across the supply chain, the Mekong Basin countries could achieve more effective interventions to limit trade in illegal wildlife.

Part VII:  The Politics of Energy Transitions Part VII’s focus on the politics of energy transitions examines how different states have responded to climate change through investing in alternative energy sources. In the early

16    Jeannie Sowers, Stacy D. VanDeveer, and Erika Weinthal 2000s, shale gas was pitched as a clean source of energy, especially when compared to coal. Such shifts in energy production and sources of energy are not simply driven by changes in technology that make new sources available, however. Rather, different countries may adopt strikingly different approaches to new sectors, such as hydraulic fracking and the extraction of unconventional shale oil. France early on banned hydraulic fracturing, whereas, in the United States, regulation was left in the hands of US states and the private sector rather than the federal government (Keulertz et al. 2018). The US industry also supported voluntary regulations as opposed to mandatory disclosures for the chemicals used in the hydraulic fracturing process (Neville et al. 2017). The lack of coordinated oversight and baseline studies, however, meant that little information is available to the public on total water withdrawals or cumulative chemical loads in groundwater from multiple fracking operations. Since the US oil and gas industry is in the hands of the private sector and the sector remains largely unregulated, many small and medium size companies turned the United States into a leading producer of shale gas even as it became clear that this development had numerous negative environmental and social impacts, including methane pollution. Shanti Gamper-​Rabindran, in her chapter on “Fracked Communities and Taxpayers in US and Argentina,” examines the variation in political, legal, and financial institutions that allowed the shale gas industry to externalize negative economic, health, and environmental costs. What is striking in both cases is the power of state and local governments to prevent affected communities, including Indigenous communities, from restricting shale gas development in their areas. Ultimately, to push meaningful energy transitions forward, Gamper-​Rabindran argues that entrenched industries able to capture the policy process and externalize costs will need to be reformed. While renewables have the potential to reduce energy poverty and thus contribute broadly to social welfare and economic growth globally, their introduction faces numerous political, economic, and social challenges. Michaël Aklin, in his chapter on “Renewable Energy, Energy Poverty, and Climate Change,” probes what hinders the expansion of renewable energy given its potential economic benefits and contributions toward decarbonization. Aklin sheds light on the high costs of renewables to consumers and the variation in government support for, and social acceptance of, the renewable sector. While much attention has focused on solar as the means to expand energy access in many low-​income countries, Aklin notes that renewable energy may not fully raise living standards. It is essential to analyze the comparative dimensions of the supply chains underpinning new energy sources to understand their diverse social and environmental impacts. Dustin Mulvaney, in his chapter “Renewable Energy Supply Chains and the Just Transition,” shows that while much attention has focused on the importance of new energy sources to address global climate change, different types of renewable energy depend on different materials and supply chains, with differential impacts for actors involved in the different sites of production. For example, cobalt is required for batteries, and its production, refining, and manufacturing takes place across a broad range of countries, including the Democratic Republic of Congo, China, Japan, and Germany. Given varying institutional structures and geographies, supply chains may generate more negative impacts in some countries than in others. As Mulvaney notes, “The attribute of being renewable is not sufficient to understand

Introduction   17 the implications for sustainability or environmental justice, as there are many ways that renewable energy could be produced, integrated, or deployed, and these configurations affect who benefits and who is made more vulnerable by energy transitions.” Last, to decarbonize the world economy, the countries likely to be most resistant are those that depend most on fossil fuel exports as their main source of revenue. Daniel Rabinowitz, in his chapter on “The Rise and Fall of Fossil Fuels,” suggests that even the most fossil-​fuel dependent countries can be incentivized to lead the transition to renewable energy. Facing an uncertain future owing to climate change that is leading major importers of oil and gas to shift to renewables, and the negative consequences of rising temperatures and increasing drought, ruling elites in Saudi Arabia and other major oil-​exporting Gulf countries may find reasons to undertake an energy transition.

Part VIII:  Cities and Sustainability Cities are increasingly important actors in environmental and climate governance. Their demographic and political weight within their respective countries give them even more prominence in setting national and regional environmental agendas. Issues of urban sustainability are thus at the forefront of comparative environmental inquiry. All three chapters in this section use comparative analysis to take seriously the diversity of cities and their distinctive roles as nodes in local, national, and transnational political economies and cultures. As the chapters show, CEP interventions in urban studies benefit from including comparative perspectives grounded in the fields of anthropology, geography, and political ecology. Urbanization constitutes one of the greatest social, economic, and environmental transformations of the past century. Most of the world’s megacities are in Asia and, with the exception of Japan, are found in middle-​or lower-​income countries where they are hubs of government, finance, industry, and trade. Many continue to grow each year, both in terms of population and spatial distribution. Eight of the 23 largest cities in the world (based on total population) are in Asia (China, Japan, and the Philippines), five in South Asia (India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh), four in Latin America (Mexico, Argentina, and Brazil), two in the Middle East and North Africa (Egypt and Turkey), and two in Africa (Democratic Republic of Congo and Nigeria). Rural-​to-​urban migration continues to fuel the expansion of secondary cities, towns, and provincial centers across much of the Global South, as well as in some areas of the United States. In contrast, cities in many advanced industrial countries grow slowly or are losing population, which poses quite different urban dynamics and challenges than the rapidly changing contours of other cities. Christopher Gore, in his chapter “Cities and the Environment in Africa: An Agency-​ Centered Research Agenda,” takes comparative environmental politics to the streets, informal dump sites, and urban agricultural plots of selected cities in sub-​Saharan Africa. Gore builds on development scholarship that emphasizes “co-​production” of environmental governance between civil society actors and urban authorities. His in-​depth, qualitative, field-​based research in Durban, South Africa, and Nairobi, Kenya, as well as in other cities, reveals how residents and city governments can craft innovative, effective interventions

18    Jeannie Sowers, Stacy D. VanDeveer, and Erika Weinthal across such disparate environmental issue areas as solid waste collection, urban climate change adaptation, and urban agriculture. Manisha Anantharaman’s chapter, “Reclaiming the Circular Economy: Informal Work and Grassroots Power,” further highlights the importance of understanding already-​existing urban political economies as a prerequisite for effective and just approaches to sustainability. Her focus is on the people and livelihoods in the informal waste sorting and recycling sector in many cities in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Families and micro-​enterprises extract value from waste streams through collecting, sorting, disassembling, refurbishing, and repairing activities and are important but underappreciated actors in the domestic and international waste and recycling trade. State plans to “upgrade” and “improve” informal waste recycling sectors in many of these cities, however, have often marginalized and sometimes dispossessed these communities, motivated in many cases by land speculation, corporate profit, and class-​and caste-​based prejudices. The ideal of a green circular economy, in which waste and materials are indefinitely recycled and reused, is increasingly invoked as a new paradigm for urban sustainability, particularly by some cities in the European Union. Fundamentally, the question of who benefits from novel interventions to “close the loop” in materials and energy is a political one. Anantharaman argues that corporate and state initiatives for new “circular economies” rarely consider the experience and needs of already-​present communities involved in local circular economies. The chapter by Eric Chu and Linda Shi, “Urban Climate Adaptation: Discontents and Alternative Politics,” on comparative urban adaptation, echoes some of the environmental justice themes of the prior two chapters but does so through an epistemological critique of the “dominant ways of knowing” employed by planning and climate professionals in cities across the global North and South. As part of the growing field exploring different forms of “climate urbanism,” Chu and Shi identify shared discourses and approaches in urban adaptation planning for climate change, including extrapolating vulnerability from climate models and prioritizing engineering and “hard” infrastructure projects to deal with climate risks (particularly for sectors considered high-​value or that serve middle-​and upper-​ income communities). Like other forms of urban planning, climate adaptation planning has also been significantly shaped by neoliberal development paradigms calling for privatization of public assets and the shrinking of public services. They note, however, that there is great diversity in city adaptation plans and that some cities have succeeded in incorporating alternative approaches. These include more adequately conceptualizing social/​climate vulnerability in terms of historical marginalization and exclusion, incorporating environmental justice perspectives into adaptation planning, and engaging with civic and climate activists demanding a fundamental restructuring of not only urban energy systems but also entrenched structures of inequality.

Part IX:  Environment, Resources, and Violence The final section expands the volume’s exploration of various relationships between violence and the environment. The chapters in Part IX explore the effects of armed conflict

Introduction   19 and “peacetime” military activities on the environment; the militarization of conservation efforts; and the ways in which civil wars are more a product of state policies than drought or climate change per se. War and armed conflict have long wrought a grim toll on the physical environment and human and non-​humans alike, as David Pellow’s chapter in Part III highlights. The stark images of denuded landscapes destroyed in trench warfare in World War I, the fire-​bombed cities of World War II, aerial spraying of agent orange in Vietnam by US forces, the billowing smoke and fires of the Kuwaiti oil fires in the Gulf War, and the destruction of Ukrainian cities and infrastructure all show only the most visible and immediate forms of harm. As Jeannie Sowers and Erika Weinthal show in their chapter, “War and Environmental Politics: A Comparative Perspective,” preparation for war, militarism, and the ongoing activities of military-​industrial complexes impose large environmental footprints and long-​term environmental impacts, only some of which are adequately documented given the histories of secrecy around these institutions. The environmental and health impacts of the nuclear arms race on remote areas of the United States and the Soviet Union illustrate some of these issues, as does ongoing spraying of herbicides and defoliants for security purposes. They further review the literature on environmental security to show how natural resources such as timber, diamonds, water, and fossil fuels are used by parties to conflict—​as a weapon, as a source of revenue, and sometimes as a locus for negotiation and cooperation. Last, they warn that the wartime targeting of civilian infrastructures and economic warfare measures such as sanctions can lead not only to long-​term negative impacts on human health but also undermine ecosystem functioning and viability. While Sowers and Weinthal focus on the environmental impacts of war and military-​ industrial activities, Marwa Daoudy’s chapter, “Climate and Conflict: Lessons from the Syria Case,” interrogates assumptions that natural resource scarcity—​and, in particular, droughts—​lead to armed conflict and civil war. Using the case of the mass Syrian uprising in 2011–​2012 and subsequent civil war, Daoudy refutes these arguments. As anthropogenic global warming led to more intense and prolonged droughts across much of the eastern Mediterranean in the 1990s and 2000s, rural communities in northeast Syria had already been rendered vulnerable to food and water insecurity by government policies. The ideological commitment of Syria’s Ba’athist regime to self-​sufficiency in cereals promoted agricultural policies that overextracted groundwater and sought to extend irrigation to areas traditionally used for pastoralism. The uprising itself did not rely on either the areas or the populations most gravely affected by drought. It was instead primarily a revolutionary political challenge to the Assad government, which was widely viewed as neglectful, corrupt, and repressive. Rosaleen Duffy and Francis Massé, in their chapter “The Integration of Conservation and Security: Political Ecologies of Violence and the Illegal Wildlife Trade,” explore the militarization of anti-​poaching efforts in South Africa’s Kruger’s National Park and other national parks, particularly in sub-​Saharan Africa. Increased poaching of rhinos and elephants is part of the expanding global illegal wildlife trade, driven by demand in China and Vietnam for black rhino horn also addressed in the chapter by Nillasithanukroh et al. As Duffy and Masse show, enforcement efforts have an increasingly militarized character. A reliance on military technologies, private security forces, paramilitary training and arming of rangers, and the criminalization of wildlife poaching have come to the fore. The authors note that the “securitization” of conservation is partly in response to the militarization of poaching

20    Jeannie Sowers, Stacy D. VanDeveer, and Erika Weinthal itself, with armed criminal syndicates seen as a threat to the country’s natural heritage. The authors argue that these “enforcement-​first” approaches to conservation foster new discourses of policing, violence, and militarization in and around protected areas, rather than reducing global demand for illegal wildlife or prioritizing resources to address poverty and livelihood opportunities for local communities.

References Hochstetler, Kathryn. Political Economies of Energy Transition: Wind and Solar Powerin Brazil and South Africa. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021. Keuleurtz, M., J. Sowers, E. Woertz, and R. Mohtar, R. “The Water-​Energy-​Food Nexus in Arid Regions: The Politics of Problemsheds.” In Oxford Handbook of Water Politics and Policy, edited by K. Conca and E. Weinthal, 167–​196. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018. Neville, Kate J. Fueling Resistance: The Contentious Political Economy of Biofuels and Fracking. New York: Oxford University Press, 2021. Neville, Kate, Jennifer Baka, Shanti Gamper-​Rabindran, Karen Bakker, Stefan Andreasson, Avner Vengosh, Alvin Lin, Jewellord N. Singh, and Erika Weinthal. “Debating Unconventional Energy: Social, Political and Economic Implications.” Annual Review of Environment and Resources 42 (2017): 241–​266. Nixon, Rob. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011. https://​doi.org/​10.4159/​harv​ard.978067​4061​194. Selin, Henrik, and Stacy D. VanDeveer. European Union and Environmental Governance. London and New York: Routledge, 2015. Starobin, Shana, and Erika Weinthal. “The Search for Credible Information in Social and Environmental Global Governance: The Kosher Label.” Business and Politics 12, no. 3 (2010): 1–​35. Steinberg, Paul F., and Stacy D. VanDeveer. Comparative Environmental Politics Theory, Practice, and Prospects. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012. Weinthal, Erika, and Kate Watters. “The Transformation of Environmental Activism in Central Asia: From Dependent to Interdependent Activism.” Environmental Politics 19, no. 5 (2010): 782–​807. Young, Oran. International Governance: Protecting the Environment in a Stateless Society. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994.

Pa rt I

STAT E S A N D E N V I RON M E N TA L P OL IC I E S I N C OM PA R AT I V E P E R SP E C T I V E

Chapter 1

The Environmenta l Stat e and Its Li mi ts James Meadowcroft Over the past two decades, scholars directed increased attention to the development of the “environmental,” “green,” or “ecological” state (Dryzek 2003; Eckersley 2004; Barry and Eckersley 2005; Christoff 2005; Duit 2016; Meadowcroft 2005, 2012; Bäckstrand and Kronsell 2017). Although usage of these terms varies, all draw on the fact that modern states have increasingly become enmeshed in the challenge of environmental governance.1 During the last third of the twentieth century advanced industrial countries built elaborate mechanisms of regulation, specialized bureaucracies, and ideational and knowledge systems for addressing environmental challenges. And environmental argument emerged as an irreducible feature of political life. Over the ensuing decades much has been done to improve environmental conditions in the most developed states, and yet the weakness, inconsistency and fragility of these gains is continuously on display. Setting aside the more complex problems of climate change and biodiversity loss, even on the mundane issues of air and water pollution, states with comparatively sophisticated mechanisms of environmental governance (such as Germany or the United States) remain prone to serious “lapses” where they fail to deliver basic standards of environmental protection. Consider the Volkswagen diesel emissions scandal that came to light in 2015, where hundreds of millions of citizens (especially in Europe) have been exposed to elevated nitrogen oxide emissions. Or the ongoing lead contamination of drinking water brought to the fore by events in Flint, Michigan, in 2014. Not surprisingly, these and other failures have led some scholars to become skeptical of the achievements of the environmental state, referring to its “decline” (Mol 2016) or to a “glass ceiling” which severely limits its sphere of action (Hausknost 2020; Hatzisavvidou 2020). This chapter reexamines the accomplishments and potential of the environmental state. As its starting point, it considers efforts to address air pollution. This choice may appear paradoxical: If societies now face acute global threats such as climate change, why dwell on the more conventional problem of air pollution? The issue provides an interesting entry point for several reasons. It has a long pedigree, with ordinances regulating smoke going back centuries. And air pollution was among the problems that prompted the establishment of modern systems of environmental governance in the 1960s and 1970s (Weidner and

24   James Meadowcroft Janicke 2002). Despite what is sometimes assumed, the problem is not straightforward, with multiple sources and substances of concern, complex interactions among pollutants in the atmosphere, transboundary impacts, and a continuously evolving understanding of potential harms to humans and natural systems. Controlling air pollution remains a challenge in developed states, to say nothing of developing countries from China and Mexico to India or Nigeria. Recent estimates put worldwide premature deaths associated with air pollution at more than 8 million a year (Vohra et al. 2018). Although it may appear an “easy case” when compared to climate change or preventing biodiversity loss, it is not so easy as to be trivial. Approaching the environmental state on its “home turf ” can therefore provide a useful jumping off point to reflect on its accomplishments and limitations. The chapter is organized into four sections. The first provides a brief introduction to modern environmental governance. The second reviews experience with managing air pollution, showing how political processes mediated through the environmental state have allowed a gradual ratcheting up of standards in the developed countries. The third explores broader implications for environmental governance, suggesting that the potential for existing states to dramatically reduce environmental burdens is far from exhausted. Last, a brief conclusion considers the future of the environmental state and suggests some avenues for further research.

Greening Governance Environmental states emerged during the final three decades of the twentieth century as advanced industrial societies wrestled with increasing environmental dislocation driven by economic development. They involve specialized administrative structures, bodies of law and regulation, systematized scientific knowledge, and the expenditure of state funds to mediate interactions with the environment (Duit et al. 2016). With the birth of the environmental state, continuous intervention to protect the environment became accepted as a legitimate activity of the public power (Dryzek et al. 2002; Meadowcroft 2005). Argument over exactly what this entails has become an irreducible dimension of political life (Barry and Eckersley 2005; Meadowcroft 2012; Bäckstrand and Kronsell 2017). The genesis of this environmental state was closely linked to the emergence of the concept of the environment. Prior to the 1960s “the environment” was rarely invoked to denote the totality of human surroundings which provide the context for societal well-​being but which are being degraded by human activity (Meadowcroft 2017). This notion of a “threatened environment” drew together a disparate array of phenomena (industrial pollution, agricultural chemical use, air and water quality, protection of wildlife and landscapes, conservation of renewable resources, urban living conditions, waste management, and so on), absorbing them into a narrative about the destructive consequences of industrial civilization. Faced with the magnitude of this threat, it made sense to call for national governments to establish specialized systems of control, with dedicated organizations, personnel, knowledge, and budgets, to protect the vulnerable environment and reduce harm to humans and ecosystems. Over time the “official” diagnosis of the seriousness of environmental problems and the scale of the societal effort required to manage them has evolved. Early initiatives focused

The Environmental State and Its Limits    25 on pollution control and clean-​up (Janicke and Weidner 1997; Hanf and Jansen 1998; Tatenhove et al. 2000). Attention later turned to the introduction of “environmental management systems” and to adjusting processes and products to reduce the imposed environmental burden. By the time “sustainable development” received international endorsement at the 1992 Rio Earth Summit (World Commission on Environment and Development 1987), “policy integration” had become a central concern, with the goal of linking environmental considerations into decision-​making across government and throughout society (Nilsson and Eckerberg 2007; Jordan and Lenschow 2008, 2010; Persson et al. 2018). With time, perspectives and approaches initially championed by environmental activists and researchers gradually gained acceptance in the governmental sphere, such as ecosystem management, life-​cycle analysis, adaptive management, carbon pricing, and others (Meadowcroft and Fiorino 2017). Climate change put discussion of global “environmental limits” firmly on the international agenda (Meadowcroft 2012). Recent talk of the circular economy, green industrial policy, a green recovery, and the transition to net-​zero carbon emissions has pointed to an active role for the state in reconfiguring economic processes into more ecologically friendly configurations. The emergence of the environment as a focus for activity by national governments in developed states from the 1970s paved the way for an increasing internationalization of environmental governance through (a) the convergence of policy prescriptions and institutional structures across nation states, encouraged by institutions such as the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) (Long 2000), (b) the spread of systems of national environmental control from developed states to an increasing number of developing countries, and (c) the establishment of multilateral and transnational governance mechanisms (Duit et al. 2016). Conceptualizing this history in terms of the evolution of an “environmental state” points to parallels with the twentieth century growth of the “welfare state” (Meadowcroft 2005; Gough 2016), which also emerged as a product of long-​term political conflicts associated with the rise of industrial societies, capitalist economic development, and democratization (Flora and Heidenheimer 1981; Held 1983; Pierson 1998). Discussion of the state (Skocpol 1979; Evans et al. 1985; Pierson 1996; Hague et al. 2019; Hay et al. 2005), the welfare state (Ashford 1986; Arts and Gelissen 2010), the security state (Mabee 2009), and their linkages to “varieties of capitalism” (Hall and Soskice 2001; Hay 2020) has long been a staple of comparative politics as analysts have struggled to understand cross-​national variation in patterns of political and economic power and their evolution over time. While the welfare state focuses on redistribution and service provision (Gough 2008), the environmental state has to date functioned primarily by regulating activities deemed to have environmentally undesirable consequences (Gough and Meadowcroft 2011). Like welfare states, environmental states are but one dimension of a politico-​administrative state structure that is embedded within (and helps to reproduce) a broad set of established socio-​ economic arrangements. Like welfare states, they are not finished products but are constantly reworked through social and political struggle. Environmental goals, programs, and institutions exist in tension with other state functions and structures (Meadowcroft 2012). And the existence of environmental states does not mean that environmental concerns trump other issues any more than welfare states guarantee a permanent end to inequality and social privation.

26   James Meadowcroft The account of the environmental state presented here is broadly consistent with a “neo-​materialist” conception that understands the state as an (only partly integrated) institutional construct that is bound up in and marked by particular social and economic relations. Modern states perform functions critical to social reproduction, but the order they reproduce benefits some groups more than others (Dunleavy and O’Leary 1987; Huber et al. 2015). It is broadly agreed that, over the past half century, environmental states in the developed countries have achieved much to clean up contaminated sites, reduce air and water pollution, improve management of waste and toxic chemicals, ameliorate forestry practices, and extend protected areas (Duit 2014; EEA 2020). These improvements have been secured even as population and economic output in these countries have grown. On the other hand, it seems that while problems may be managed, they rarely go away. Sometimes solutions turn out to have been forms of displacement (where impacts are shifted across media or space or time) or of problem-​substitution (where the new practices generate other difficulties which only gradually become apparent). Over the decades, the scale at which environmental impacts are manifest has grown, moving from local to global, as has their “social reach” into domains more deeply embedded in existing institutional arrangements. New problems continue to emerge as existing practices are reproduced at a broader scale that finally triggers overt harm, research reveals negative processes that had hitherto escaped notice, and novel technologies create additional impacts which provoke a societal response. To these difficulties must be added the unevenness of environmental states—​in the level of environmental protection each accords across an array of issues, and of their failures—​ when they do not consistently implement their own rules and policies. The apparent fragility of their accomplishments, as a new government or changed economic circumstances can lead to a rapid unravelling of previous gains, is also evident: Trump rolling back vehicle fuel efficiency standards or clean water regulations in the United States, deregulation risks associated with Brexit, and so on. And also their inequities, where environmental burdens and the costs and benefits of environmental policy, are distributed unevenly across communities (within countries as well as internationally), as a number of chapters in this volume explore. All this is before we talk of the difficulty of making meaningful progress in relation to the meta challenges of climate change and biodiversity loss associated with the continuing growth in the human appropriation of the biosphere. Indeed, despite the measures that have been taken over the past half century, the overall scale of the human impact on the non-​human natural world continues to expand (Geo5 2012; Waters et al. 2016; Newbold et al. 2016; Bar-​on et al. 2018; IPBES 2019).

Governing the Air It used to be that you could dump pretty much whatever you wanted into the air. Not so today, where in developed countries complex regulatory systems control emissions of multiple pollutants from numerous sources. Rules apply not just to discharges from large industrial facilities, but also to the products that can be brought to market and the activities of businesses and households. The history of air pollution control over the past century is

The Environmental State and Its Limits    27 complex, with significant variation across jurisdictions, but some of the main features are highlighted here. • The range of substances subject to some form of control has steadily expanded. Initial efforts were focused on visible pollutants: smoke and soot, particularly from coal combustion. Attention then moved to smog, sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides, ground-​ level ozone, lead, stratospheric ozone-​depleting substances, volatile organic compounds, mercury, particulates (PM10 and PM2.5), ammonia and greenhouse gases (GHGs). • Concern has been with both ambient levels and emissions. Ambient levels determine the potential exposure to harm of humans, the built environment, and natural ecosystems. Air quality standards establish maximum ambient pollutant concentrations below which harm is deemed acceptable. Emissions drive ambient levels, so restrictions on emission can reduce ambient levels and the associated harms. Issues of causality, the nature and severity of harms, technological and behavioral alternatives to existing practices, and the costs of action and inaction typify the discussion of air quality standards and emission control. • Strategies to manage air pollution include reducing human exposure to high ambient levels (smog advisories, air filtration for buildings, mask recommendations), displacing polluting activities geographically (siting restrictions) and in time (activity limits for specific periods), diluting pollutants in greater volumes of air (tall smokestacks), the treatment of exhaust gases (capturing pollutants for processing and/​or alternative disposal), altering feedstocks or production processes to avoid generating emissions (burning low-​sulfur coal), and satisfying needs in ways that obviate demand for damaging activities or products. • Control efforts typically focus first on major point sources, then on mobile and widely distributed sources. Smoke controls were applied to coal-​fired power plants (higher smokestacks and moving plants away from urban areas), then to railways (with a switch from steam to diesel electric locomotives) and domestic heating fuel (substituting coal with smokeless fuel). Later measures for coal-​fired power generation included improving combustion efficiency, switching to low-​sulfur coal, flue gas desulphurization, electrostatic precipitators (for particulates), demand management (reducing the need for new power plants), and fuel switching (to gas and other generation technologies). Building heating moved from coal to gas or electricity. Attempts to control automobile emissions focused on changing engine design, altering fuel composition, adopting catalytic converters to clean tailpipe emissions, restrictions on car usage, shifting commuters to mass transit or active mobility, and so on. • Over time the jurisdictional level at which air pollution has been addressed has evolved. Originally understood as a local issue caused by local industry and climate conditions, early action campaigns were based in major cities (Temby 2012). By the 1950s, weaknesses of this strategy were becoming apparent; national governments became more involved with research and monitoring, and pioneering air pollution legislation was adopted in some countries, such as the United Kingdom. By the late 1960s and early 1970s, air pollution control was “nationalized” across the developed world with the adoption of national emission controls and air quality standards. Growing evidence of the long-​range transport of pollutants, such as acid rain in Europe and North America and mercury deposition in the Arctic, prompted increased international

28   James Meadowcroft cooperation. The United Nations Economic Commission for Europe Convention on Long Range Transboundary Air Pollution (LRTAP), with its evolving protocols covering different substances, coordinated a collective response. And further international initiatives followed. Yet states (and the state-​like European Union) remain in the driving seat, largely determining the pace and direction of efforts to address air pollution. • Justifications for air pollution control have shifted over time, variously including the prevention of nuisance and property damage (e.g., to buildings) and the maintenance of a cleanly urban environment, the reduction of acute damage to ecosystems (forest die-​back, lake acidification, eutrophication, etc.), and the protection of human and planetary health. • Science has played a critical role in understanding how pollutants react in the environment and in identifying potential harm to humans and ecosystems. A collaborative modeling approach proved critical to building trust in the LRTAP process (Bäckstrand 2017). Yet knowledge of harm on its own has rarely driven action. Nor has research been effectively oriented to explore the full range of potential threats (Grandjean 2013). Understanding the human health consequences of air pollution continues to expand: for example, recent evidence suggests that particulates are associated not just with respiratory ailments but also with cardiovascular, endocrine, and cognitive issues, as well as with diseases of the eye. With this knowledge have come calls to lower ambient thresholds and secure more profound emissions reductions (WHO 2021). If we look back over half a century, the data reveal significant reductions in the emission of major air pollutants and improvements in ambient air quality across the developed world (Fowler et al. 2020a, 2020b; Amann 2020). Emissions of sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, carbon monoxide, lead, volatile organic compounds, and particulates have all fallen substantially, although the depth of reductions varies by substance and country. The curves for some pollutants are choppy, but the overall decline is clear (see, e.g., Figures 1.1 and 1.2). Over this period, developed countries have experienced an absolute decoupling of economic growth from these criterion air pollutants (Fowler et al. 2020a; McDuffie et al. 2020). Does this mean that these governments have cracked the problem of air pollution? Clearly not. Despite emissions reductions and improved air quality, significant harm to human health and ecosystems continues. On the health side, this is illustrated through estimates of premature death, while monitoring for acidification, eutrophication, and other ecosystem damage shows continuing damage from air emissions, even if at greatly reduced levels. Why? Because, while emissions are down, they are not down far enough. Many cities or regions regularly fail to meet established air quality standards. Even within cities that meet overall targets, neighborhoods near industrial facilities or major highways—​where the poor or marginalized communities tend to live—​suffer disproportionately (Tessum et al. 2021). Thus, emissions controls are not sufficiently strict (or are not adequately enforced) to secure consistent attainment of ambient standards that protect the entire population. And even when existing air quality standards are met, the damage remains because limits have not been reduced to reflect advances in the understanding of the impacts of pollution. For example, many developed countries have yet to adopt the 2005 WHO air quality guidelines, to say nothing of the more stringent standards issued in 2021.

Index: 1970 = 100 (For Ammonia 1980 = 100)

125

INDEX LINE

100

Ammonia Non-methane volatile organic compounds

75

50

Nitrogen oxides

PM10

25

PM2,5 Sulphur dioxide 0 1970

1975

1980

1985

1990

1995 Year

2000

2005

2010

2015

Source: Ricardo Energy & Environment

Figure 1.1  Trends in annual emissions of particulate matter (PM10 and PM2.5), nitrogen oxides, ammonia, non-​methane volatile organic compounds, and sulfur dioxide, 1970–​2019 (1980–​2019 for ammonia) in the UK. Source: UK DEFRA 2020 (https://​www.gov.uk/​gov​ernm​ent/​publi​cati​ons/​emissi​ons-​of-​air​pol​luta​nts/​emissi​ons-​of-​air-​pol​luta​nts-​in-​the-​uk-​1970-​to-​2018-​summ​ary)

Change Relative to Initial Measurement*

3.0

2.0

1.0

0 1980

1990 Gross Domestic Product (GDP) Sulfur Dioxide (SO2)

2000 PM2.5

Ozone (O3)

Carbon Monoxide (CO)

2010 Nitrogen Dioxide (NO2) Lead

Figure 1.2  Change in gross domestic product and six common air pollutants, 1980–​2018, in the United States Source: Federal Reserve Economic Data | Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. *The index begins at 1 in 1980, with the exception of PM2.5, which was measured beginning in 2000. The index for each year is the actual value divided by the initial value. Available at: https://​www.resour​ces.org/​archi​ves/​look​ing-​back-​50-​years-​clean-​air-​act-​1970/​

30   James Meadowcroft Thus, the overall pattern is one of a stepwise improvement of air pollution outcomes spread over more than half a century, where advances typically lag the evolving scientific understanding of potential harm by one or more decades. Pollution control measures that provoke the least disruption to established economic interests are adopted first. But increased scientific knowledge, advocacy campaigns that broaden the public perception of damage, and expanding technological options to reduce emissions (at low cost or that secure other benefits) feed into political/​policy system cycles that allow a periodic ratcheting up of standards and controls. Demonstration of the inadequacy of existing standards can ultimately focus attention, increasing pressure on governments to introduce more stringent policy measures and on industry to adopt technological alternatives to lower emissions. The process is far from smooth or unidirectional: regulations can be relaxed as well as strengthened, changing business strategies or consumer demand can spur growth of new emissions sources and pollutants, and regulatory failures (poor instrument design, lack of monitoring or enforcement) can lead to worsening conditions. In comparative terms, political system factors matter, including the ease of producer group access to government and possibilities for regulatory capture, opportunities for pollution control advocates to organize and mobilize pressure, and whether a return to primary legislation is required to implement tighter controls (Fiorino 2011). Business routinely opposes more stringent measures, with loss of international competitiveness often cited as a reason to delay, although in some countries and sectors the opposite case is made (early movement to higher environmental standards can spur innovation and enhance competitiveness) (Porter and Linde 1995). Pioneer jurisdictions do much to dispel myths that higher standards will bankrupt industry. Over time the trend has been toward a ratcheting up of standards across the developed world. And with the establishment of regulatory systems in less-​affluent countries (often modeled on OECD norms) this trend has become international.

The Volkswagen Emissions Scandal The Volkswagen emissions scandal is illustrative of these processes. In the 1990s, with climate emerging on the political agenda, European governments began to encourage consumers to shift to more fuel-​efficient diesel engine cars (with lower CO2 emissions per mile). Although embraced by European automakers who held an advantage in diesel engine design for light-​duty vehicles and saw a way of deferring more fundamental change to the industry to confront climate change, the policy was flawed on two counts. First, diesel engines produce more conventional pollutants, including particulate matter and nitrogen oxides. And, second, from a climate perspective, the turn toward diesel was a distraction from developing power trains compatible with full decarbonization (electric or fuel cell vehicles). Although the EU gradually tightened its conventional air emissions standards, the regulations were designed to accommodate the motor industry through a loose inspection regime that avoided realistic road tests (with varying terrain, traffic, weather conditions, etc.). Notwithstanding this lax regulatory environment, manufacturers experienced increasing difficulties meeting the bench tests: not that the standards could not be achieved, but that attainment implied additional costs (for emissions abatement technologies) and servicing requirements that customers might find irksome. Instead, Volkswagen (and

The Environmental State and Its Limits    31 other manufacturers) deployed software “defeat devices” which switched engines into a pollution control mode during lab testing but turned down the abatement apparatus for ordinary driving. The result was real-​world NOx emissions many times the permitted levels (Oldenkamp et al. 2016). When a US lab uncovered the scam, regulators initiated enforcement proceedings and imposed billions of dollars in fines for the implicated companies. The excess emissions helped explain why NOx in European cites was consistently above predicted levels. Volkswagen and other manufacturers suffered significant reputational damage, and critics pointed to collusion between industry and regulators that allowed abusive practices to go undetected. Although the German government ensured the scandal did not threaten the survival of a strategically significant firm, they supported a modest tightening the EU emissions control system. The shock of this episode was sufficiently large to spur Volkswagen to rethink its approach, abandon the diesel engine, and accelerate the transition to electric vehicle (EV) technologies.

Politics and Ratcheting Up Not everyone would agree with the account just given. Some would emphasize the extent to which air quality gains in developed states have been facilitated by structural economic shifts that have little to do with environmental goals—​the shuttering of inefficient factories in Eastern Europe after the collapse of communism in 1990 and the transfer of polluting industries to developing countries with the internationalization of production chains and dominance of the service sector in developed economies. Thus, any fall in emissions in the rich countries has been more than offset by surging pollution in China or India. Moreover, to the extent that governments in developed states have acted to enforce more significant air pollution controls, they have often done so after industry has already begun to embrace technological alternatives. So, state action appears more like a post hoc confirmation of a trajectory already anticipated by business rather than as an autonomous driver of environmentally oriented change. It is true that the locus of many extractive and manufacturing activities has shifted away from the rich countries. But the achievement of absolute reductions in conventional air pollution, in a context where population, economic activity, energy use, and material consumption have continued to grow, represents a significant achievement (Vestreng et al. 2007). Pollution in rapidly industrializing countries is causing major environmental damage, but in the most successful of these economies the state is already beginning to adopt more stringent air controls. This is particularly the case where states are competent and where development and environmental goals can be pursued in tandem. Consider how China’s drive to deploy EVs is reducing domestic air pollution even as it helps the country dominate the global supply chain of this emerging technology. Moreover, analysis suggests that even at the global level some air pollutants may have peaked (SOx), and, over time, we can expect that the dynamics that have led to enhanced air pollution control in the richer countries will be extended elsewhere (Fowler et al. 2020a; McDuffie et al. 2020). Ultimately, some form of regional air pollution control regime in Asia (like LRTAP in Europe and North America) could contribute to such an outcome. With respect to the second issue, the point is not that environmental regulators have always been out in front, proactively scanning the horizon for threats and imposing rules

32   James Meadowcroft that compel industry to avoid environmental harm. Even when they are up to the analytical challenge, politics may prevent any immediate response. Rather, it is that the emergence of an air pollution issue into the political sphere—​with arguments over the social costs and benefits of emission reductions—​can trigger a response across multiple actors, initiating a search for potential solutions. This process of “social sensitization,” one facilitated by institutions of the environment state, can shift the socio-​political landscape, changing the context in which firms operate, altering the societal perception of products and processes, and influencing choices around research, product development, investment, and consumption toward pathways that can begin to address the problem. Of course, industry lobbies try to obfuscate the issue and delay or dilute action, unless they see a potential competitive gain. Such competitive gains can include the prospects for new markets, advantage over rivals, and reputational value. Even as they resist regulatory initiatives, however, they or other actors search for ways around the problem that could provide a good return should the move toward emissions abatement become imperative. Often this search turns up advantageous alternatives, with material or energy efficiencies, lower costs, enhanced performance, or consumer appeal. Or approaches pursued for quite distinct ends gain additional traction because of their ability to sidestep the pollution problem. Unsurprisingly, states are hesitant to take regulatory action before a “cost competitive” option appears on the horizon. They have other concerns besides the environment and fear that premature action could place national firms at a disadvantage, disrupt economic activity, and so on. Thus, businesses may begin to implement technological solutions even before regulations come into force. But that does not alter the fact that politics, with its potential to highlight problems and mobilize the regulatory and economic weight of the state, has been working in the background to help “steer the search” for solutions.

Implications for the Environmental State So, what does the air pollution case suggest about the potential and limits of the environmental state? First and most obviously, it illustrates the extent to which environmental states are anchored in wider political institutions and underlying socio-​economic relationships. They represent but one dimension of a state that must continuously reconcile multiple goals and societal tensions and that structurally favors certain interests over others. Despite the grandiose affirmations sometimes found in constitutional preambles or basic environmental laws, the environment is not generally treated as a special category somehow foundational to the attainment of other social goods. The protection of citizens and ecosystems from the harms of environmental pollution must take its place among an array of other state priorities that include economic development, welfare provision, maintaining order, and national security (Meadowcroft 2012). In comparative terms, the stage of economic development is a basic determinant of air pollution outcomes, influencing the scale and source of emissions, the pollical/​administrative attention allocated to air issues, and the institutional capacity of the state to orchestrate a coherent response (Fiorino 2011). That said, even in developed countries with strong organizational and fiscal capacity, air quality issues compete for attention with other pressing problems. And pollution control advocates must work to prevent historic gains from being (a) swamped by the continued growth in

The Environmental State and Its Limits    33 population, energy use, and material consumption (while cars emit less pollutants per kilometer, there are more of them on the roads, traveling greater distances); or (b) subject to political erosion (e.g., through deregulatory initiatives); to say nothing of (c) battles to secure additional gains in air quality. Nevertheless, controls have been ratcheted up over time. Critical to this process has been • the advancing scientific understanding of the sources of air pollution, the evolving chemistries as pollutants move through the biosphere, and their impacts on ecosystems and human heath; • the organized intervention of activist groups and professional communities (environment and health advocates, community groups, campaign organizations, educators, and so on) to promote more vigorous government action; and • continued technological innovation in relevant industries and across the economy more generally (as well as allied social and business model innovations) that create novel possibilities for clean alternatives to manage pollution or replace processes and products that generate air emissions and that can strengthen the economic interests vested in these novel approaches. The environmental state provides an institutional frame to support this process on multiple levels: codifying established standards, monitoring air quality and regulatory compliance and publicly reporting results, supporting scientific research on pollution and emission reduction approaches, serving as a focal point of expertise within government and for external groups, communicating with the public on the causes and solutions to air pollution, linking into international networks and expert bodies concerned with environment performance (furthering the exchange of data, development of joint approaches and methods, peer review), and normalizing new conceptual frames that can legitimate more comprehensive pollution control efforts (e.g., “integrated pollution control,” “sustainable development,” “circular economy,” “net zero GHG emissions”) (Meadowcroft and Fiorino 2017). So, at least with respect to air pollution, what we observe is not a permanent stagnation of emission control efforts or a collision with a “glass ceiling.” Instead, there is continuing pressure both to dig deeper on long-​standing issues (nitrous oxides, particulates, ozone depleting chemicals, etc.) and to explore action on emerging issues (ammonia, plastics). As the list of substances of concern grows and the scale of desired reduction increases, so, too, does the pressure to reach more deeply to transform production (and sometimes consumption) practices which are at the source of persistent problems. Rather than a “glass ceiling,” a more appropriate analogy may be one of advancing through the levels in a video game. At a certain point, what can be accomplished at a given stage comes to an end. Further progress demands that the players step-​up a level, deal with wider and more challenging problems, and deploy an expanded set of tools. As the scale and character of the human impact on the natural word changes, so new capacities and resources are demanded from environmental governance. It is interesting to note how the emergence of more fundamental air emission issues can open the door to the resolution of other long-​standing problems. Leaded gasoline provides a good example. From the 1920s, the medical profession had sounded “early warnings” that adding lead (a well-​known toxin) to gasoline as an anti-​knocking agent represented a significant public health threat (Needleman and Gee 2013). But objections were successfully

34   James Meadowcroft overridden by powerful economic interests, and, for half a century, the practice went largely unchallenged. Eventually, accumulating evidence of severe developmental damage to children, combined with the urgency of addressing smog-​inducing automobile tailpipe emissions, led to the phase out of leaded gasoline. It turned out that lead “poisoned” catalytic converters, so the best bet for reducing tailpipe emissions required a switch to unleaded gasoline.2 A similar sort of process is now playing out at a still more fundamental level with the shift from internal combustion engine to battery electric vehicles. Although conventional air emissions from internal combustion engine vehicles could in principle be reduced further, there is no straightforward pathway to eliminate CO2 emissions from gasoline combustion.3 Faced with the certainty of ever tightening GHG emissions standards and rapid advances in EV technologies driven by Tesla and Chinese companies, established automakers such as GM and Volkswagen finally decided to accelerate the EV shift. This change, when combined with a movement to GHG emission-​free electricity generation, will ultimately eliminate most conventional air pollution associated with automobiles.4 However, not all environmental problems are the same, and one cannot assume that progress on air pollution guarantees similar results elsewhere. Environmental issues vary with respect to the spatial and temporal scales over which negative feedbacks accumulate and the social embeddedness of the practices which engender them. When impacts are spatially dispersed or remote from those who cause them, when feedbacks are stretched over decades or centuries and offending practices are deemed central to existing ways of life and the interests of power holders, solutions are harder to find. Soil loss (which played an important role in the decline of ancient civilizations and continues with industrial monocropping), unsustainable patterns of water use (on display, e.g., in the US Southwest), and contamination of ecosystems and people by chemicals are cases in point (Montgomery 2012). But this is especially true for the meta problems of climate change and biodiversity loss, and it is to these broader problems that critics typically point to establish the ultimate impotence of the environmental state. A substantial academic literature explores the limitations of contemporary environmental governance. In addition to work on implementation failure (Howes 2017), regulatory capture (MacLean 2016), the challenges of collective action (Percival 1998), corporate power (Gonzalez 2001), and the reproduction of social inequalities (Ard 2015), many writers emphasize underlying structural barriers that prevent states from consequent action to address environmental crisis. The most influential strand focuses on capitalism and the logic of growth, suggesting that, to survive, capitalism requires continuous economic growth; economic growth necessarily entails an expansion of material throughput; and this increasing material footprint drives ever more extensive environmental destruction (Schnaiberg et al. 2002). To ask contemporary states to end this destructive spiral would be to expect them to erode their own (capitalist) economic foundations: to abandon the growth that allows continued capital accumulation, funds welfarist consumerism, generates tax revenues to support state institutions and activities, and maintains the prosperity and political stability that gets politicians re-​elected. Variants of these arguments point to the role of the international system, where cooperation is difficult and interstate rivalry, such as that emerging between the United States and China, drives environmentally destructive conflict; the pathologies of contemporary democracies, where business elites wield decisive power; and fiscal dilemmas, such as the perceived impossibility of a “degrowing” state to sustain welfare expenditure while also financing climate mitigation and adaptation) (Bailey 2020).

The Environmental State and Its Limits    35 Clearly, we cannot take up these complex arguments in any detail here. But while acknowledging that multiple structural barriers are operative, it is worth emphasizing that there are reasons to believe that these limits are less absolute than critics contend. In the first place, it is far from evident that the linkages between capitalism, economic growth, throughput growth, and critical environmental impacts are as tight as sometimes postulated (Meadowcroft 2017). One could imagine capitalism without (much) economic growth, or economic growth without (much) material throughput growth, or (some) material throughput growth without a corresponding increase in critical environmental loadings. Any combination of these possibilities would weaken an automatic link between capitalist economic foundations and ever-​expanding critical environmental impacts. Yet to argue that modern states do not rest on economic foundations that by definition require a continuous extension of critical environmental burdens does not mean that current political-​economic arrangements do not encourage such an extension. Prevailing practices allow the private accumulation of wealth through the externalization of environmental costs and the socialization of environmental risk. Businesses routinely increase value by exploiting unsustainable process of production and encouraging unsustainable patterns of consumption. The co-​evolution of technologies, financial practices, regulatory regimes, and consumer expectations can “lock-​in” existing social-​technical configurations that are vigorously defended by interests that benefit from their reproduction. Economic management (maintaining a stable macro-​economic climate, supporting businesses, creating jobs) is a critical government preoccupation, and concern to avoid disruption of existing economic activities (or offend major economic interests) acts as a constraint on environmental policy. Moreover, underlying features of current economic reality including the commoditization of new areas of social life, the power of multinational corporations and markets over capital flows, increasing corporate concentration, credit-​based “consumer society,” business models built around planned obsolesce, the manufacture of “artificial needs,” the cultivation of positional goods, and so on continuously frustrate efforts to bring environmental pressures under control. Thus, there is a sense in which failures of the environment state are overdetermined. These institutions were called into being precisely because the “natural” operation of contemporary political economies was eroding the integrity of the ecosystems on which human welfare and future development depended. To this extent environmental states have always been pedaling up hill on a track littered with potholes, obstacles, and false turns. Nevertheless (as we have seen in the case of air pollution) states have made some progress in addressing environmental ills because the actual operation of these constraints is open to political contestation and reform. Putting it rather simplistically: states will not deliberately bankrupt themselves with environmental policies, but the range of non-​bankrupting but meaningful policies is substantial. States cannot alienate the whole business world simultaneously, but they can bear down on some interests while opening avenues for others. They will not turn prevailing economic relationships upside down, but they can substantially reorder legal frameworks governing property rights. They will not systematically put environmental concerns before other societal issues, but they will sometimes put the environment first. Environmental policy success over the past four decades on issues that have managed to capture public and political attention show that the veto of vested interests is not absolute. The political realm remains dynamic, closed policy communities can be broken open,

36   James Meadowcroft consensus-​favoring policy stasis can be overturned, and politicians (and bureaucrats and businesses leaders) personally wedded to environmentally pernicious behavior eventually leave the scene. The literature on policy change emphasizes reframing issues, building political coalitions, exploiting windows of opportunity (political crises, catastrophic events, disarray among opponents, etc.), and institutionalizing practices that can secure better environmental outcomes even when political attention has shifted elsewhere (Steinberg 2001; Steinberg and Stacy 2012; Sowers 2012; see Steinberg chapter, this volume). Economic elites are fragmented, and these cleavages can be exploited by skillful political action. While some businesses oppose change, others may see opportunities. Policy intervention can deliberately strengthen the latter, building up new centers of economic power to generate jobs, export earnings, and tax revenues, shifting the center of gravity away from incumbents. Recent scholarship on socio-​technical transitions has added insights on encouraging niche players and destabilizing incumbent regimes to encourage system adjustment (Leipprand and Flachsland 2018). In other words, the “ratcheting up” process described earlier with respect to air pollution can at least in principle be operative across a range of environmental issues. So, while the story of climate mitigation is usually presented as one of policy failure—​an inability to act decisively despite 30 years of international effort—​it can also be understood as a processes of accumulating political forces and technological resources required to actualize change. With states now explicitly discussing and, in many cases, implementing, regulatory, fiscal, innovation-​ policy, and industrial-​ policy measures to phase out fossil fuel usage and restructure entire industrial sectors, a transformative project of considerable scope is gathering pace. Deeper engagement with environmental issues will require adjustment across multiple spheres, including the operation of the economic and political systems. And it may be that changes result from broader political movements to improve welfare, equity, and governmental effectiveness rather than being driven purely by environmental concerns.

Looking Forward Whatever the ultimate limits on the environmental effectiveness of modern states, we are far from having reached them today. Indeed, experience suggests that, despite the difficulties, it is possible to find ways around structural obstacles to address particular environmental problems, given time to build appropriate coalitions and implement necessary institutional reforms. “Given time” is the first caveat here. Negotiating significant policy change can take repeated attempts and many decades. Even then the solution may be partial. The air pollution issues we have discussed here underline this reality. The constraints that block action by existing democratic states on major environmental problems can be removed or circumvented but this happens typically through protracted processes of public sensitization, political coalition building, partial policy reform, and capitalizing on periodic crises. Precisely because environmental policy is not an isolated sphere but is intertwined with economic and social practices across the polity (in agriculture, resource extraction, industry, transportation, cities, and other sectors) and cross-​connected internationally, change involves iterative rounds of struggle across multiple domains. More particularly, it can imply reform in

The Environmental State and Its Limits    37 other core areas of state activity including economic management, international relations, and welfare systems. And it can require adjustments to the organization of the state itself. “But there is no time!” comes the reply: science tells us that on climate change (for example) we must dramatically reduce emissions now, or it will be too late. If environmental states cannot deliver now, then they are fundamentally impotent. There are several possible responses to this. One is to point out that climate change will continue to grow more severe as long as we keep releasing GHGs into the atmosphere. And the longer we go on, the greater the ultimate impact. So, it is better to bring down emissions sooner rather than later. Still, “later” is better than “much later” and “much later” is preferable to “very much later.” True there may be critical “tipping points,” and delay increases the risk that we will encounter such discontinuities. On the other hand, we may already have crossed such thresholds. So, action is urgent, for even if we have passed one tipping point there are others to be avoided. But we should remember that politico-​economic obstacles to action are real obstacles that must be given their due. They cannot simply be wished away. Another line of response is to point out that there is in any case no plausible course of action that does not invoke the apparatus of existing environmental states. No radical reorganization of society is likely in the short term to speed up the required transformation of technology, social practice, and governance to address climate change. Indeed, radical system change might be accompanied by dislocations that could delay action even further. So, for now, we are stuck with the environmental state. The second caveat is that it is important to assess constraints in relation to “particular” environmental problems. This can be understood in two ways. In the first place, “particular” as opposed to “universal” or “general.” The “environment” is composed of many interrelated processes, operating at different spatial and temporal scales, which are experienced in different ways by different actors at different times and places. So, there can be no definitive and comprehensive statement of the “environmental problem” and hence no universal “solution” to environmental problems. There are many environmental issues, and how they are to be defined or managed is continuously socially contested. Second, “particular” in the sense of “this problem” but not necessarily “that problem.” In other words, depending on how environmental problems are identified there will be some that have no solution accessible to the environmental state (and perhaps to any other form of socio-​political formation that could readily emerge from current conditions). The third caveat is that while it “is possible” to overcome constraints (relating to specific problems and given time), there is no guarantee that they will be overcome. What happens will depend on the evolution of political forces, technologies and social practices, interaction with contingent events, and so on. So it is not possible to know in advance the extent to which a given set of constraints can be overcome in a specific and evolving context. This means that, in a very real sense, we cannot determine exactly what are the “limits” to the environmental state in advance of serious and protracted efforts to realize change. Only by struggling practically to push the boundaries of the possible can one determine exactly how far change can go.

Whither Comparative Research on the Environmental State? This chapter has considered the development of the environmental state, primarily in developed countries over the past 60 years, arguing both that it has achieved

38   James Meadowcroft real-​but-​partial improvements and that we are far from having reached the limits for further reform. This context suggests important areas for future comparative research. In the first place, more effort could be applied to the analysis of developing countries (including poor, middle-​income, and rapidly industrializing societies) (see Hochstetler chapter this volume), to states that lack representative-​democratic political institutions (Sowers 2012), and to states in which political systems shift between military and civilian rule (see the chapter on Chile, this volume). More generally, work is needed to explain differential outcomes (both across problem areas and across countries): Why are advances made on some problems and/​or in some polities and not others? Despite pioneering work (see, e.g., Duit 2016; Koch and Fritz 2014), environmental states have proved resistant to ready classification (akin to Esping-​Andersen’s 1990 characterization of welfare states): Could more be done to build convincing typologies? And, despite work on policy instruments, there is still inadequate understanding of the broader institutionalization of environmental states (budgets, personnel, organization, legal frames), at least in comparison to the voluminous work on welfare structures, bureaucracies, and expenditure. Above all, we need more research on the transformative practice and potential of environmental states as they move into a phase where governance serves not just to mitigate impacts, but also to actively restructure production and consumption practices to meet global challenges associated with issues such as climate change and which are already beginning to take shape under the banners of green industrial policy, green innovation policy, and net-​zero implementation.

Acknowledgments The author would like to acknowledge contributions from Paula Barrios (then a postdoctoral research fellow at Carleton University) and Bruce Lorie (President of the Ivey Foundation), to research on which the discussion of air pollution is based, and the Ivey Foundation which provided funding support.

Notes 1. For the purposes of this chapter, I understand the environmental state to be an existing entity analogous to the welfare state. I take “green state” to be an ideal construct—​a state that really takes the environment seriously. “Greening” is a process whereby environmental issues become more deeply embedded in state institutions and routines. How far existing states can come to reflect “green state” ideals remains to be seen. 2. In an interesting twist, the industry’s preferred substitute for lead itself turned out to be a major pollutant. Its phase-​out several decades later saw a return to ethanol, which is what was originally replaced by lead. 3. Strictly speaking this is not true: direct air capture could draw down CO2 produced by burning fossil gasoline or gasoline could be synthesized by a process drawing on renewable energy. But neither of these processes is near commercial viability today. 4. Cleaning up the emissions from vehicle production and managing particulate emissions from tire and road wear will remain challenges (Emission Analytics 2020).

The Environmental State and Its Limits    39

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Chapter 2

California ’ s Environmenta l P ol i c y Leadersh i p David Vogel Introduction Throughout its history, California has played a leadership role in the making of environmental policy. In areas of regulation ranging from wilderness and coastal protection to automobile emissions, energy efficiency, chemical safety, and global climate change, California has typically been on the cutting edge of environmental policy innovation in the United States. Many of California’s policies have had impacts beyond its borders, among both other states and the federal government, and at time internationally—​a pattern of policy diffusion that has been labeled “the California effect” (Vogel 1995). Because California is a state within a federal system, its policies have frequently influenced federal regulations even as these policies have also been shaped by federal actions. This relationship is a complex one and its dynamics are constantly shifting. Historically, many regulations that California initiated were subsequently adopted by the federal government. But, the federal government’s recent efforts to roll back and weaken the nation’s environmental regulations frequently brought it into conflict with California. As the state with the most stringent and extensive environmental regulations, California played a leadership role in opposing the environmental policies of the Trump administration.

Nature Protection California’s attractive natural environment played a critical role in the state’s historical environmental leadership. Threats to its natural amenities led to the nation’s first environmental protest, and the first protected wilderness in the United States was designated in California in 1864.

44   David Vogel In June 1853, California gold miners chopped down a 300-​foot-​tall Sierra redwood tree that was more than 1,000 years old. A large section of the tree’s trunk was then exhibited to paying customers in the United States and Europe who had never before seen such a large tree. The cutting down of this and other magnificent trees, which were among the oldest, largest living entities in the world, provoked outrage. A San Francisco newspaper expressed shock “at the vandalism and barbarity of flaying that giant of the woods,” while a Boston-​ based magazine wrote that “it seems a cruel idea, a perfect desecration to cut down such a splendid tree” (Tackach 2019, p. 95). The New York Herald responded by urging federal action: “We say that Congress should interpose . . . these tress are public property. . . . it is the duty of the state of California, of Congress . . . to protect and to preserve those California monuments of the capabilities of our American soil” (Tackach 2019, p. 95). During the 1850s, the nation was preoccupied with the sectional strife that led to the Civil War and had no time for wilderness protection. But these protests were nonetheless historically important. In a nation whose vast natural resources had been repeatedly exploited for financial gain, they signaled the beginning of public support for protecting nature for its own sake. In 1959, Horace Greeley, the influential editor of the New York Tribune, visited Yosemite Valley, a deep glacially carved, virtually enclosed valley in the Sierra Nevada Mountains. It was located about 100 miles from where the large tree had been cut. Greeley proclaimed it “the most unique and majestic of nature’s marvels.” His assessment was echoed by Frederick Olmsted who described Yosemite as “the union of the deepest sublimity with the deepest beauty of nature” (Vogel 2018, p. 51). But the natural attractiveness of the valley was threatened by logging, which would in turn open up Yosemite to livestock grazing. Olmsted wrote to California’s U.S. Senator John Conness urging that Yosemite be protected. Olmsted’s initiative was supported by California’s steamship industry, which wanted to attract visitors to Yosemite in order to encourage travel on the industry’s ships. In May 1864, Conness introduced legislation to protect both Yosemite Valley and an adjacent stand of giant sequoias, which the Senator argued had “no parallel perhaps in the world” but were now “subject to damage and injury” (Browning and Silver 2020, p. 197). His proposed statute gave the valley and the grove of ancient sequoias to the state of California, with the stipulation that the “State should accept this grant upon the express conditions that the premises shall be held for public use, resort, and recreation” and “shall be inalienable for all time” (Tackach 2019, p. 99). The legislation came before the Congress in the midst of some of the most bitterly fought battles of the Civil War, when Grant was beginning a long effort to defeat Lee’s Army of Virginia in what became known as the Overland Campaign. As Browning and Silver note, “it may be more than mere coincidence” that Conness’s bill was introduced on May 17, 1864, “ten days after the Battle of the Wilderness and the beginning of the bloody Overland Campaign” (Browning and Silver 2020, p. 197). Underlying Congressional passage of the Yosemite Valley Grant Act and its signing into law by President Abraham Lincoln on June 30 was the hope that the natural world could be a source of spiritual rebirth and healing. This idea “came to the fore in a nation whose land and people had been torn asunder by war” and would shape future protections of the western landscape (Browning and Silver 2020, p. 199). The Yosemite legislation was unprecedented: it was the first time federal lands had been granted to a state in order to be protected. The Yosemite Act also marked the beginning

California’s Environmental Policy Leadership    45 of wildlife conservation in the United States because the terms of the grant also protected the fish and game within the park’s boundaries. While Yosemite was originally a state park, it served as a model for the nation’s first official national park, which was established in Yellowstone in 1872. By 1890, three of the nation’s four national parks were in California (including Yosemite Valley, which became part of Yosemite National Park in 1906). In 1916, Congress established the National Park Service, which gathered into a single system 14 national parks and 21 national monuments. As of 2020, 62 national parks cover more than 80 million square miles of the United States, including many of the nation’s most important and distinctive natural attractions. However, the protection of the nation’s public lands remains contentious and contested. In 2019, a public lands bill was passed with bipartisan support that created five national monuments protecting more than 1.3 million acres of wilderness. It also expanded two national parks and blocked more than 370,000 acres of public lands from mining. But through executive orders, the Trump administration’s Interior Department removed protection from 145 million acres of public land, opening them up to mining, including the land bordering the national parks in California’s desert areas (Shea and Kustin 2019).

Coastal Protection Coastal protection is another environmental policy area in which California has played a leadership role. Oil drilling in California began in the San Joaquin Valley in the 1870s. It subsequently spread to the city of Los Angles and the Santa Barbara Coast. By the 1920s, the Los Angeles basin was producing 80 percent of the state’s oil output. Subsequently, oil drilling expanded from dry land onto the beaches of Los Angeles. As a consequence, the shore became filled with derricks, drilling piers, fences, and pipes. Fences and oil equipment often blocked beach access, while spilled oil, derrick fires, noise, and fumes further interfered with the recreational uses of the beach. “Oil drilling operations transformed the beaches from recreational to industrial landscapes,” threatening the prosperity of shoreline communities (Ekland 2001, p. 24). In the mid-​1930s, a new organization, the Shoreline Planning Association, was formed to lobby for increased public beach access. Thanks in part to the Association’s efforts along with public support, oil rigs and drilling equipment on and around the beaches in southern California were progressively removed, making California the first state to restrict coastal oil drilling. The increased attractiveness of the beaches of southern California made them into major commercial assets, which overshadowed their value as sources of oil. However, coastal oil drilling continued, led primarily by the federal government. In 1968, the federal government sold leases for offshore drilling off the coast of Santa Barbara, with disastrous consequences. The ecological vulnerability of California’s coast to oil drilling was dramatically revealed in January 1969, when a spill from an offshore well located within the federal government’s jurisdiction deposited between 2 million and 3 million gallons of oil into the Santa Barbara channel (Nash et al. 1972). It impacted 800 square miles of ocean and coated more than 35 miles of coastline with oil up to 6 inches thick. This spill severely impaired the economy of what had become a major resort community. Charter fishing, boat rental, and marine and fishing supply companies all suffered heavy losses, as did beachfront hotels, motels, and

46   David Vogel restaurants. The volume of beachfront property sales declined while the value of beachfront property decreased between 15 and 25 percent due to the oil spill (Vogel 2018). The spill received extensive national media attention. News coverage showed dramatic pictures of thousands of petroleum-​covered birds and blackened beaches while a Congressional hearing on the spill was broadcast by the nation’s major television networks. The disaster—​the largest offshore oil spill in the United States to date—​called national attention to the vulnerability of the nation’s coastal areas to oil drilling and played an important role in sparking an upsurge of public interest and support for stronger environmental regulations by the federal government. Once again, a threat to California’s natural environment had political and policy implications beyond the state. In response to the spill, California prohibited the drilling of any new wells on existing leases within the 3 miles of the ocean that it controlled. Florida, which also had extensive commercially valuable beachfront properties along its Gulf and Atlantic coasts, followed California by imposing similar restrictions. It banned all offshore drilling in state waters and, like California, also opposed additional drilling in federal waters. Florida’s political leaders were concerned that even though such drilling could produce substantial revenues and jobs, it “could cause the economy to go bust by scaring off tourists and hurting commercial fishing” (Goklany 1999, p. 118). As had initially occurred in California, many states began to increasingly recognize that the amenity values of their coasts were more valuable than the potential revenues from oil drilling (Freudenburg and Gambling 1994). State support for coastal protection has become an important source of political opposition to oil drilling. In January 2018, the Trump administration announced that it planned to reopen virtually all the coasts of the United States to oil drilling in the 4 to 6 miles off the nation’s coasts in which the federal government had jurisdiction (Tabuchi and Wallace 2018). Florida, whose tourism industry on its Gulf Coast had been severely impacted by the Deepwater Horizon rig disaster off the coast of Louisiana in 2010, immediately announced its opposition to these plans. Florida Governor Rick Scott stated that his “top priority was to ensure that Florida’s natural resources are protected” (Friedman 2018). His opposition to offshore drilling was echoed by Republican Representative Francis Rooney, who stated that “offshore drilling will negatively affect our environment, tourism and military readiness.” Rooney added that “I am fighting to protect our Florida coast for future generations to enjoy because Florida’s economy is dependent on clean water and a healthy environment” (Friedman 2018). The governors of every state on the continental East and West Coasts also announced their opposition to the federal plans, typically couching it in economic terms. Virginia governor-​elect Ralph Northam stated that expanding drilling would jeopardize his state’s tourism and fishing industries, while North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper described it as a “critical threat” to the state’s economy, one that could cause unrecoverable damage to the state’s $3 billion tourism and fishing industries (Friedman 2018). According to Governor John Carney of Delaware, “tourism and recreation along the Delaware coastline account for billions in economic activity each year and supports tens of thousands of jobs”(Profeta 2018). In response, the Trump administration was eventually forced to abandon its oil drilling expansion plans—​one of the most significant examples of an effective backlash by several American states to federal efforts to weaken environmental protection.

California’s Environmental Policy Leadership    47

Controlling Air Pollution If California’s unusually attractive wilderness helped inspire the nation’s national park system and the economic value of its beaches initiated opposition to off-​shore oil drilling, its unusual levels of urban air pollution played a critical role in promoting the regulation of automotive emissions. During the 1950s, urban southern California had the worst air quality in the United States. This was in part due to the region’s unique topography, which trapped ground-​level pollutants. But this natural proclivity for poor air quality was exacerbated by both the region’s substantial population growth and its high concentration of motor vehicles. By 1956, 3 million cars were registered in Los Angeles county, making it home to the largest concentration of motor vehicles in the world (Vogel 2018). In 1947, California enacted the nation’s first state air pollution control statute. The Air Pollution Control Act authorized the creation of local air pollution control districts. The first and most important of these was established in Los Angeles. The Los Angeles Air Pollution Control District not only became the largest and best funded pollution control agency in the United States, but its innovative regulations and the expertise it developed in formulating and implementing them also influenced the work of state and local pollution control agencies throughout the United States. In 1960, California went a step further, establishing a new state agency, the California Motor Vehicle Pollution Control Board. It was given the authority to approve new technologies to reduce vehicle emissions. The Board subsequently enacted the nation’s and the world’s first tailpipe emission standards, which went into effect in 1966. The first federal standards that went into effect 2 years later were based on California’s standards. After other states began to consider enacting their own vehicle emission requirement—​some of which differed from those of California—​the automobile industry became worried that a “multiplicity of different State standards would create chaotic conditions in the nation’s largest industry” (Rabe 2019, p. 126). When Congress began to consider legislation further strengthening federal pollution control standards in the 1960s, it faced a battle between the national automobile industry, which wanted uniform national standards, and the state of California. The state had recently established a new agency, the California Air Resources Control Board, to strengthen its administrative capacity to regulate air pollution. Its officials insisted that the state needed to retain the ability to establish its own vehicle emission standards because federal standards were unlikely to be sufficiently stringent to address the unique air pollution problems faced by Los Angeles. The battle in Washington was a heated one, but California prevailed. The Air Quality Act of 1967 established uniform emission standards for all new vehicles sold in the United States, but permanently exempted California. The state was permitted to request a waiver from a federal agency, allowing it to adopt more stringent standards than the federal government whenever it could demonstrate a “compelling need” to do so. This California exemption was unprecedented in a federal regulatory statute. It meant that the United States would become the only country with two separate automobile emissions standards and that California would be able to continue to play a leadership role in this policy area.

48   David Vogel California’s innovative role in the making of automobile emission standards has proved both enduring and influential. Between 1968 and 2007, the state made 117 waiver requests, all but a handful of which were granted (Rabe 2019). But what made California into a national regulatory leader was that many of its more stringent standards were subsequently adopted by the federal government, often within 2 to 5 years. For example, unleaded gasoline, the two-​way catalytic converter, and evaporative control systems were first required in California and then nationally. Of the 90 newly established or strengthened standards required by the federal government’s 1990 Clean Air Act Amendments, nearly all of them had previously been required for vehicles sold in California. Because other states, especially those in the relatively heavily polluted Northeast, also wanted to adopt California’s standards, in 1977, Congress permitted all states the option of choosing between California and federal emission controls. This provision was retained in the 1990 Clean Air Act amendments, with the added proviso that no state could adopt more stringent standards than California. These statutory changes increase California’s national leverage since no state could adopt regulations exceeding federal standards until California had done so. Thirteen states in addition to the District of Columbia, which account for one-​ third of the national vehicle market, have adopted several of California’s pollution control regulations, with vehicles sold in the rest of the United States required to meet the federal government’s somewhat laxer emissions standards.

Renewable Portfolio Standards Renewable portfolio standards require that a certain portion of electricity be produced from renewable sources, such as wind, solar, and geothermal. Because the United States has no federal renewable energy requirements, these regulations are up to American states. While California was not the first state to issue such requirements, its targets have been among the most progressive. In 2002, California required that investor-​owned utilities and other retail sellers increase their production of energy from renewable sources from 12 to 20 percent by 2010 (Golden 2003). This standard was subsequently strengthened: the state established a renewable energy target of 33 percent by 2020 and 50 percent, later increased to 60 percent, by 2030. Most ambitiously, California plans to have 100 percent of its energy come from carbon free sources by 2045—​making it one of eight states to commit to such a sweeping goal. As part of its plan to increase energy production from renewable sources, California has aggressively promoted the use of solar energy (Vogel 2018). The state has 750 solar installations, including three of the largest photovoltaic facilities in the world. California now produces more solar power than any other state and accounts for nearly half of the power generated by solar electric generation facilities in the United States. The state has also encouraged the development of local or rooftop solar generation. In 2006, it launched the California Solar Initiative, with the goal of installing 1 million solar roof facilities by 2018. To help accomplish this goal, the state has provided generous tax subsidies as well as introduced net metering, which permits homeowners to sell back their excess power to the utility grid. In 2018, the state went a step further, requiring all new residential buildings to install rooftop solar installations. Half of all rooftop solar panel installations in the United

California’s Environmental Policy Leadership    49 States are in the state of California and they produce 5 percent of the state’s energy, more than in any other state. The size of the state’s large solar installation industry has provided its firms with the financial resources to lobby for regulations to promote solar installations in other states, again illustrating the state’s broader policy impact.

Promoting Energy Efficiency California also has been a leader in promoting energy efficiency (Vogel 2018). In 1982, the California Public Utilities Commission adopted a new regulatory approach for the state’s utilities. Known as “decoupling,” this approach gave utilities a financial incentive to meet the energy needs of their customers not by constructing new power plants but rather by promoting energy conservation. In effect, it made “negawatts” as valuable as “megawatts.” In 2007, California subsequently increased the incentives of the state’s utilities to help their customers use less energy and further reduce the need to construct new power generation plans. California was the first state to change its utility rate regulations to encourage energy efficiency and conservation. In 2009, the federal government made a state’s receipt of federal funds to promote energy efficiency conditional on their adopting regulatory policies that provided utilities with incentives to reduce energy use, mirroring what California had begun more than two decades earlier. Currently, more than half of the states have adopted some form of utility revenue decoupling, once again demonstrating California’s broader policy impact. California has also played a pioneering role in enacting regulations to improve the efficiency of appliances. The state issued its first such regulations in 1976; they applied to refrigerators and freezers. The former were particularly important as these appliances are major users of energy. The introduction of new efficient models demonstrated that meeting a tighter efficiency standard was technologically feasible and cost effective (Rosenfeld and Poskanzer 2009). The California Energy Commission (CEC) subsequently established efficiency standards for several additional products, including space heaters, water heaters, air conditioners, and showerheads. As more states began to adopt California’s appliance standards, the appliance manufacturers became concerned about having to comply with a multiplicity of state standards. They now wanted the federal government to issue national standards for appliances. Once again, there was a conflict between state and federal authority. The National Appliance Energy Conservation Act of 1987 was a compromise (Klass 2010). It stated that once the federal government had issued an appliance standard, a state could no longer do so, but states were free to develop standards for products not regulated by the federal government. Significantly, as in the case of automobile emission standards, many federal standards, such as those for refrigerators, were based on those previously adopted by California. For example, the federal standards for appliances in 2005 were identical to those issued by California the previous year. Because the federal government has frequently lagged in setting new standards—​in fact the Department of Energy failed to establish standards for two-​thirds of the appliances over which it has authority—​California continued to develop its own. The California Energy

50   David Vogel Commission established new energy efficiency standards for 17 products in 2004 and added an additional 22 in 2009. The latter included the world’s most rigorous efficiency standards for televisions, which cut the energy use of flat-​panel products by 50 percent. In 2018, California issued the nation’s first energy efficiency requirements for desktop computers and monitors. Because of the size of California’s market, these efficiency requirements have become not only de facto national standards, but also are being adopted by global brands as well. California’s energy efficiency standards now cover more than 50 products—​more than any other state—​and the number of regulated products is steadily increasing. Twelve other states, led by Washington, Colorado, Hawaii, and Nevada, have also adopted standards for products not yet regulated by the federal government. In most cases, their standards tend to be based on those of California. Moreover, many appliance manufactures have chosen to manufacture all their products sold in the United States to meet California’s standards. 2019, The steady strengthening of performance standards for both appliances and buildings, as well as the efforts of its “decoupled” utility firms to promote the adoption of more energy-​ efficient technologies by residential and commercial customers, has had a major impact. California is the second most energy efficient state in the United States after Massachusetts. Between 1974 and 2014, residential energy consumption per capita remained nearly stable in California while it increased nearly 75 percent in the rest of the United States. If one compares fossil fuel input per unit of gross domestic product (GDP) across states, then between 1975 and 2016, California reduced its use of fossil fuels per unit of economic output by 70 percent compared to the other 49 states, whose reduction was 60 percent less. This gap is significant: US carbon emissions would be almost 25 percent lower today if the nation had kept up with California (Roberts 2019). Within California itself, energy efficiency programs have resulted in 30 fewer new power plants being built, which in turn has improved air quality and protected scenic areas.

Automobiles and Climate Change In 2004, California became the world’s first government to issue regulations restricting greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from motor vehicles. These regulations proved very popular, and, by 2007, 17 states, which accounted for half of all new vehicle sales in the United States, had adopted them. However before California or any state could implement them, California first had to receive a waiver from the federal government’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) In 2008, the EPA rejected California’s request on the grounds that climate change was an international problem, not one that especially affected California, and therefore the state’s statutory exemption did not apply. California, along with several other states that also supported these regulations, appealed this ruling. While this litigation was still pending, Barack Obama became president in January 2008. He asked the EPA to reconsider California’s waiver request, which the agency did, approving it in June 2009. The automobile industry, now worried about a patchwork of state rules, negotiated with the Obama administration to establish new national restrictions on GHG emissions, and California in turn agreed to adjust its own rules to link them to the newly established federal ones. The federal standards issued in 2010 required automakers to progressively improve the fuel efficiency of their vehicles to an average of 54.5 miles per

California’s Environmental Policy Leadership    51 gallon by 2025, nearly double their average in 2012. To meet these requirements, the industry would need to speed the development and increase sales of zero-​and low-​emission vehicles. Because tailpipe emissions are a leading source of GHG emissions in the United States, and burning less fuel produces less carbon dioxide, these strengthened fuel economy standards represented a key component of the Obama administration’s program to address the risks of climate change. Once again, the state’s “bottom-​up” tactics had a national impact. As former EPA director William Reilly wrote in 2013, “We would not be where we were today if California had not kept up the pressure for cleaner cars” (Reilly 2013). In addition, to promote a national market for electric cars, in 2012, the California Air Resources Board (CARB) issued new zero-​emission vehicle (ZEV) mandates, which required that a percentage of each auto company’s total sales had to be either fully electric, plug-​in hybrids, or powered by hydrogen fuel cells. These requirements were adopted by nine other states and have played a critical role in increasing the sales of electric vehicles in the United States, half of which have been sold in California. They have also provided an incentive for the world’s major automotive manufacturers to increase their production and marketing of electric cars. The Trump administration, which took office in January 2017, announced that it planned to both issue new weaker federal fuel economy standards and repeal the waiver the Obama administration had approved for California. In September 2019, the EPA formally revoked California’s wavier, which also prevented any other state from retaining more stringent fuel economy standards. California and 23 other states then filed a lawsuit challenging the EPA’s decision, setting up a major conflict between California and the federal government (Tabuchi 2020). When, in March 2020, the federal government officially announced the weakening of national fuel economy standards, nearly two dozen states, led by California, sued to reverse this decision. This was the eighty-​second lawsuit filed by California against the Trump administration, most of which have targeted the White House’s reversals of climate change and other environmental regulation, making California the leading state opponent of the Trump’s administration’s deregulatory initiatives. California prevailed in 20 of these suits; the others were resolved (Phillips 2019). With the election of President Joseph Biden in 2020, these legal conflicts between state and federal environmental standards diminished as federal standards were strengthened.-​often with the support of California. The Trump’s administration’s unprecedented rollback of California’s waiver had politically divided the automobile industry. Fearing a split American market, Ford, Honda, BMW, and Volkswagen, which together account for 30 percent of new car sales, announced that all the vehicles they sell in the United States will meet the California standards being challenged by the Trump administration. Thus the state’s pioneering efforts to reduce GHG emissions from motor vehicles continue to shape industry practices. Notably, one of the first environmental initiatives of the Biden Administration was to approve California’s vehicle emissions waiver.

Leadership on Global Climate Change In January 2005, California’s newly elected governor Arnold Schwarzenegger made a speech at the United Nations World Environmental Day conference in San Francisco in which he

52   David Vogel stated that “the time for action is now. California will not wait for our federal government to take strong action on global warming” (Vogel 2018, p. 206). He then issued an executive order that required the state to reduce its current GHG emissions to their 2000 levels by 2010 and then to reduce them to 80 percent below their 1990 levels by 2050. The state legislature followed by passing the Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006, which mandated a cut in state GHG emissions to 1990 levels by 2020 (Nichols 2009). While other states had previously set GHG reduction targets, and some of them were more stringent than California’s, their goals were either narrow in scope or not legally binding, making the California statute “the most ambitious climate change legislation enacted anywhere in North America and among the most aggressive polices in the world” (Rabe 2013, p. 67). The law’s passage had a national impact: 14 other states now have GHG reduction targets (Vogel 2018). In 2012, acting under the authority granted to it by the Global Warming Solutions Act, the CARB began to implement a cap and trade program. Under this plan, GHG emissions covered by the program were capped and then required to be reduced each year. Firms were issued permits for their carbon allowances, which they then could buy or sell to one another. While three years earlier, Congress had failed to approve a similar plan, California was still willing to go ahead on its own. However, the state had hoped that neighboring states sharing its power grid would follow its example as this would improve the effectiveness of emissions trading. None was willing to do so. Today the state’s only formal partnership for its cap and trade plan is with the Canadian province of Quebec. In 2016, the California legislature voted to expand the state’s emissions reduction goals. This legislation codified an executive order requiring the state to reduce its GHG emissions to 40 percent below its 1990 levels by 2030—​an interim target for the state’s long-​term goal of achieving an 80 percent reduction by 2050. These goals are among the most ambitious in the world. Led by California Governor Jerry Brown, in 2017, the state legislature voted to extend the state’s cap and trade program through 2030. For Brown, the June 2017 decision by President Donald Trump to withdraw from the Paris Climate Accord had made it especially critical for California to show the world that the United States was not abandoning its climate change reduction commitments. As Brown stated, “I want to do everything we can to keep America on track, keep the world on track” (Plumer 2017). With the Trump administration’s strong opposition to policies to reduce GHG emissions, American leadership in addressing the risks of global climate change has passed to California and other state and local governments. California state officials have established a de facto State Department, working to cooperate with and assist governments throughout the world on their emissions reduction efforts. Established jointly by California and the German state of Baden-​Wurttermberg, 165 local governments in the United States, Canada, Mexico, and Great Britain have signed on to a Global Climate Leadership Memorandum of Understanding committing them to keep global temperatures from rising more than 2 degrees Celsius. California’s global leadership has been particularly notable in China, where the state is serving as a technical advisor to 100 cities. China’s zero-​emissions vehicle regulations were based on those of California. During a highly publicized visit to China that followed shortly after the Trump withdrawal decision for the Paris Accord, Governor Brown signed an agreement between the two governments, pledging to cooperate on exchanging emissions reduction technologies. As one observer noted, “The reference point for China is not

California’s Environmental Policy Leadership    53 Washington, it’s California. They would rather learn from California than any other jurisdiction” (Megarian et al. 2017). California policy-​makers hope that the ability of the world’s fifth largest economy to continually reduce its GHG emissions while continuing to grow economically will inspire other governments to emulate its example. Clearly, much is riding on California’s future environmental record and economic performance.

Chemical Safety California has also played a leadership role in protecting its citizens from chemicals and other hazardous materials. Its first important policy initiative took place in November 1986, when the voters of California overwhelming approved Proposition 65 (Brady and Kilroy 1989). Labeled the “State Drinking and Toxic Enforcement Act,” its goal was to protect Californians and the water they drink from harmful chemicals. It prohibited the discharge of any listed carcinogen or reproductive toxin into a potential source of drinking water and furthermore required that citizens be notified if they were being exposed to such chemicals or toxins. While federal environmental laws and rules had required new restrictions to meet a cost-​benefit test, California, in a major policy innovation, chose not to do so: the intention of this Proposition was that its restrictions on chemicals were to be entirely health-​based. The implementation of this Proposition has had a major impact on business practices, especially on consumer products (Rechlschaffen and Williams 2005). It has led to scores of these products, ranging from raincoats and other plastic clothing, to baby rash powders and creams, playground equipment, galvanized pipes, hair dyes, and nail care products being reformatted. As a result, many hazardous substances in these products, such as lead, arsenic, and mercury, were eliminated. Because of the large size of California’s consumer market, many of the products that had been reformulated to meet California’s requirements are also being sold throughout the United States, increasing the Proposition’s impact. In 2003, California became the first state to restrict electronic wastes from entering landfills (Sachs 2006). It established a program for obsolete computers, televisions, and later cell phones that contained lead and other toxic heavy metals to be collected and recycled in order to keep these dangerous substances out of landfills. By 2007, more than half of American states had adopted roughly similar “producer take back” programs for electronic products. California also went a step further, prohibiting the sale of larger electronic products that contained either four heavy metals or two chemicals known to be dangerous. This later provision was similar to a regulatory requirement issued by the European Union and has also been adopted by several American states, though most cover fewer hazardous substances or products. Brominated flame retardants (BFRs) are widely used in common household products, such as furniture padding, mattresses, draperies, and upholstery, to slow the spread of fire. While many countries have regulated or banned them, the EPA was slow to act. However, concern about their safety grew in California as BFRs had appeared in breast milk and could serve as endocrine disruptors, impairing the development of children (Daub 2005). California became the first government to ban two kinds of BFRs, requiring that they be phased out by 2008. Because the state was the largest consumer of products containing these chemicals, California’s ban effectively shut down the national market for them. Twelve

54   David Vogel other states, following California’s lead, soon banned them as well. For its part, while the federal government continued to evaluate the risks of these chemicals, it assisted the implementation of California’s de facto national ban by working with their major manufacturers to ensure that approved substitutes would be available throughout the United States. In 2008, California launched its “Green Chemistry Initiative” (Kay 2010). Historically, both nationally and in California, chemical regulations had been primarily reactive: they evaluated the safety of and, if necessary, imposed restrictions on hazardous substances already in use. The purpose of California’s new policy initiative was preventive: its purpose was to change the way products containing potentially dangerous chemicals were designed in the first place. It required companies to both identify and assess the health risks of their products and then, if appropriate, to substitute safer alternatives. The law was also sweeping in scope: it sought to reduce toxic substances in all consumer products, rather than—​as was often done in the past—​focus on one chemical or one product at a time. According to the State Department of Toxic Substances Control, which was responsible for implementing the 2008 statue, the state regulations that required manufactures to seek safer alternatives to harmful chemical ingredients in widely used consumer products gave California “the opportunity to lead the way in producing safer versions of goods already in demand around the world” (Kumar 2013). Six other states, also dissatisfied with the failure of the federal government to reform and strengthen the 1976 Toxic Substances Control Act, enacted roughly comparable “green chemistry” policy initiatives. These and other state expansions of chemical safety regulations helped prompt Congress, in 2016, to enact the Frank Lautenberg Chemical Safety Act for the 21st Century. This legislation, which had been under discussion for several years, strengthened the EPA’s authority to test the safety of hazardous chemicals and remove those already in use from the marketplace. However, its effectiveness was undermined by the Trump administration, whose officials opposed new regulatory restrictions (Kaplan 2017; Lipton 2017). In one important case, the EPA reversed a pending ban on the pesticide chlorpyrifos, which was widely used in spraying crops and was linked to health and other developmental problems in children. California, whose farmers were the biggest users of this chemical, responded by imposing its own ban. The European Union and the state of New York followed California by banning it as well. In February 2020, the chemical’s primary manufacturer announced that, due to declining demand, it would stop producing it, once again demonstrating the broader impact of California’s regulatory policy leadership (Mohan 2020).

Conclusion This chapter has explored several dimensions of California’s environmental leadership, examining both their historical roots and contemporary developments. Several of its case studies demonstrate the myriad ways in which California’s environmental policy innovations have had an impact beyond the state. This diffusion has taken place through various mechanisms: some state regulations have been adopted by other states, others by the federal government, and still others through market mechanisms reflecting the size of California’s economy. More broadly, this case study of California is informed by the fact that

California’s Environmental Policy Leadership    55 the United States is a federal system—​one in which American states have and continue to play in an important role in environmental policy-​making in the United States.

References Brady, Michael, and Maurya Kiloy. “An Introduction to California’s Proposition 65.” Tulane Environmental Law Journal 2 (1989): 45–​56. Browning, Judkin, and Timothy Silver. An Environmental History of the Civil War. Chapel Hill: University of North Caroline Press, 2020. Daub, Tracy. “California: Rogue State or National Leader in Environmental Regulation? An Analysis of California’s Ban on Bromated Flame Retardants.” Southern California Interdisciplinary Law Journal (2005): 343–​370. Ekland, Sarah. How Local Politics Shape Federal Policy: Business, Power & the Environment in Twentieth Century Los Angeles. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001. Freudenberg, William, and Robert Gambling. Oil in Troubled Waters. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994. Friedman, Lisa. “Trump Moves to Open Nearly All Offshore to Drilling.” New York Times (January 4, 2018). Goklany, Indur. Clearing the Air. Washington DC: The Cato Institute, 1999. Golden, Kevin. “Senate Bill 1078: The Renewable Energy Standard –​California Asserts Its Renewable Energy Leadership.” Ecology Law Quarterly 30 (2003): 693–​7 13. Kaplan, Shelia. “In Reversal, Chemicals Are Cleared for Use.” New York Times (December 20, 2017). Kay. James. “California Proposes New Regulatin on Chemcials in Consumer Products” Environmental Health News June 24, 2010 Klass, Alexandra. “State Standards for Nationwide Products Revisited: Federalism, Green Building Codes and Appliance Standards.” Harvard Environmental Law Review 34 (2010): 335–​368. Kumar, Dinesh. “California’s Safer Consumer Product Regulations” Chemical Watch. https://​ chemic​alwa​tch.com/​Index.cfm. 2013. Lipton, Eric. “Chemical Industry Insider Now Shapes E.P.A. Policy.” New York Times (October 20, 2017). Megarian, Chris, John Myers, and Jessica Meyers. “Gov. Brown, America’s Unofficial Climate Change Ambassador in the Trump Era, Heads to China.” Los Angeles Times (June 1, 2017). Mohan, Geoffrey. “California Banned a Pesticide from Your Food. Now It Won’t Be Manufactured.” Los Angeles Times (February 2, 2020). Nash, A.E. Keir, Dean Mann, and Phil Olsen. Oil Pollution and the Public Interest: A Study of the Santa Barbara Oil Spill. Berkeley, CA: Institute of Governmental Studies, 1972. Nichols, Mary. “California’s Climate Change Program: Lessons for the Nation.” Journal of Environmental Law 27 (2009): 185–​212. Phillips, Anna. “In California vs. Trump, the State Is Winning Nearly All Its Environmental Battles.” Los Angeles Times (May 7, 2019). Plumer, Brad. “Just How Far Can California Possibly Go on Climate? ” New York Times (July 27, 2017). Profeta, Tim. “Coastal States Oppose Offshore Drilling Proposal.” National Geographic blog (February 28 2018). nationalgeographic.org.

56   David Vogel Rabe, Barry. “A New Era in States’ Climate Policies.” In Changing Climate Politics: U.S Policies and Civic Action, edited by Yael Wolinsky Nahmias, 55–​81. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2013. Rabe, Barry. “Leveraged Federalism and the Clean Air Act: The Case of Vehicle Emissions Control.” In Lessons from the Clean Air Act, edited by Ann Carlson and Dallas Burtraw, 113–​158. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. Rechlschaffen, Clifford, and Patrick Williams. “The Continued Success of Proposition 65 in Reducing Toxic Exposures.” Environmental Law Institute 35 (2005): 10850–​10856. Reilly, William. “California Driving Clean Car Future.” San Francisco Chronicle (January 21, 2013). Roberts, David. “How California Became Far More Energy Efficient Than the Rest of the Country.” Vox (May 31, 2019). Rosenfeld, Arthur, with Deborah Poskanzer. “A Graph Is Worth Thousand Gigawatt-​ Hours: How California Came to Lead the United States in Energy Efficiency.” Innovations (Fall 2009): 57–​79. Sachs, Noah. “Planning the Funeral at the Birth: Expanded Producer Responsibility in the European Union and the United States.” Harvard Environmental Law Review 30 (2006): 51–​98. Shea, Jenny Roland, and Mary Ellen Kustin. “A 13 Million Acre Lie.” Center for American Progress (March 20, 2019). Tabuchi, Hiroko. “States Sue Trump to Stop U.S. Rollback on Emissions.” New York Times (May 29, 2020). Tabuchi, Hiroko, and Tim Wallace. “Drilling? Expect Few to Dive In.” New York Times (January 24, 2018). Tackach, James. Lincoln and the Natural Environment. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2019. Vogel, David. Trading Up: Consumer and Environmental Regulation in Global Economy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995. Vogel, David. California Greenin’: How the Golden State Became An Environmental Leader. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018.

Chapter 3

As sessing 30 Ye a rs of Neolibe ra l Environm e nta l Managem ent i n C h i l e Effective, Democratic or Neither? Javiera Barandiarán On October 18, 2019, protests against a public transit fare hike in Santiago, Chile, spilled over into a national movement demanding better social services and an end to predatory business practices. “Dignity” became the central rallying cry. For 3 weeks, protests continued in every city, despite indiscriminate violence by state security forces. Arson, looting, and property destruction accompanied the protests. Wavering between reformists and right-​wing hardliners within his coalition, President Sebastián Piñera in mid-​November acquiesced to a multiparty agreement for constitutional reform. Though delayed by the coronavirus pandemic, on October 25, 2020, Chileans voted to replace the current constitution, which has been in place since 1980, by a margin of 78 to 22 percent, in favor of reform. Just days before this uprising, President Piñera referred to Chile as a “true oasis” in a “convulsed” Latin America (Mucho Gusto 2019). This reputation for stable government and strong economic growth earned Chile in 2010 membership into the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), becoming the first South American nation to join this club of wealthy nations. Focusing on these successes, however, ignores that the richest members of society benefited disproportionately from economic growth occurring since the 1980s. In 2015, the top 1 percent took close to 25 percent of national income, making Chile more unequal than the United States (although the US is catching up fast) and on par with Brazil and Colombia (Atria et al. 2018). Essential services are expensive: Chilean households spend more out-​of-​pocket for health than any other OECD country except Switzerland and are in the top four for spending on K-​12 education, and are highest for tertiary education.1 The pension system, based on individual saving accounts, delivers less than minimum wage to 80 percent of pensioners; meanwhile, the private companies that administer pensions accrued annual returns of 25 percent between 2006 and 2015 (Heine 2020). Women’s pensions are particularly low because of job and

58   Javiera Barandiarán wage discrimination, childbearing, and unpaid household work (Arenas de Mesa 2019). Indigenous communities suffer higher levels of poverty and discrimination (Comunidad Indígena Yagán et al. 2020). Environmental activists have long denounced that environmental harms and goods, like clean water, are unequally distributed, prompting a growing number of protests focused on environmental problems; for many, this social crisis was also environmental (Calisto and Weber 2020). This chapter explains the importance of Chile’s 1980 Constitution in creating a neoliberal democracy that, among other things, transformed scientific knowledge into a market commodity and thus hindered the state’s efforts to safeguard the environment. Neoliberalism is a political rationality that puts markets at the center of human activity, championing markets as the most efficient and fair way of organizing social life (Mirowski 2019, also see Jacques chapter, this volume). Applied to environmental scientific knowledge, this means that various activities like monitoring, data collection, analysis, and assessments are conducted by (typically for-​profit) consultants hired by state officials through competitive markets. As a result, data are fragmented rather than long-​term or systematic, officials cannot develop a relationship of trust with an advisor, and distrust is rife given the constant suspicion of conflicts of interest. Chile’s market for scientific data and advice has accentuated inequities in who has access to information, creating knowledge gaps and disrupting accountability in ways that hurt environmental regulation. Neoliberal policies have varied over time, advanced unevenly, and recently begun to suffer major setbacks. Scholars consider Chile a country with a particularly advanced neoliberal regime, as observed in specific policies and in its 1980 Constitution (Harvey 2005; Pinto 2019; MacLean 2017; Valdivia 2006; Mirowski and Plehwe 2009). This chapter introduces science and technology studies (STS) concepts like “political technology” to highlight the ways in which neoliberalism should be understood as a form of applied knowledge used to transform the state and society (Tironi and Barandiarán 2014). In the case of Chile, this transformation has produced what I call an “umpire state” bent on arbitrating between private parties as if they were playing a competitive game. Scholars have long blamed neoliberalism for accelerating environmental destruction in Chile, particularly harming forest, coastal, and riparian ecosystems and generating acute industrial pollution (Liverman and Vilas 2006; Rodriguez and Carruthers 2008; Bustos et al. 2014). Indeed, the market for science—​the focus of this chapter—​is just one neoliberal policy that has contributed to environmental destruction: focusing on this market sheds light on the legal foundations within the 1980 Constitution that marginalize state initiative in favor of markets, transforming both the state and democratic practices. The final part of this chapter argues that constitutional reform in Chile needs to democratize both democracy and science to lay the foundations for a relationship among science, the state, society, and nature that is based on greater equality and strong mutual accountability. Ecuador’s 2008 Constitution offers some ideas for how to move in that direction. By contrast to Chile’s neoliberalism, in 2008, Ecuador adopted a pioneering constitution that explicitly rejected neoliberalism and introduced new governance principles, like a focus on dignity and rights of nature (RoN; Becker 2011). The rest of the chapter proceeds as follows. The first section describes Chile’s neoliberal democracy in practice through the example of environmental impact assessments (EIAs), the most important policy in the environmental regulatory playbook available to Chilean officials. The second section recounts the creation of markets for environmental

Assessing 30 Years of Neoliberal Environmental Management    59 scientific advice that occurred in the 1990s, when Chile transitioned from military to democratic rule. This was a period of change but also continuity, as the new democracy retained the dictatorship-​era 1980 Constitution. The third section analyzes how and why markets for science breed distrust, and how this hinders state officials’ efforts to protect the environment from industrial activities. The fourth section summarizes the negative environmental impacts that Chile’s neoliberal democracy had between 1999 and 2015, and it identifies ongoing knowledge gaps that continue to hinder governance efforts. The fifth section defines neoliberalism as a political rationality and the consequences of markets for citizenship, the state, and the generation of knowledge. The final section summarizes how Chile’s 1980 Constitution created a neoliberal democracy and explores what Ecuador’s 2008 Constitution can offer for attempts at reform.

The Umpire State as a Neoliberal Democracy When it comes to the environment, “neoliberalism has been linked to the privatization and commodification of unowned, state-​owned, or common property resources such as forests, water, and biodiversity; payment for environmental services; deregulation and cuts in public expenditure for environmental management; the opening up of trade and investment; and transfer of environmental management to local or nongovernmental institutions” (Liverman and Vilas 2006, p. 328). In their comprehensive review of neoliberal environmental management across Latin America, Diana Liverman and Silvina Vilas (2006) point to numerous failures of this approach, concluding that neoliberalism has done little to protect the Latin American environment. Recent research from scholars working in STS and the emerging field of neoliberal studies extends Liverman and Vilas’s approach to argue that neoliberalism is more than a series of policies like privatization. Rather, neoliberalism is a political rationality that transforms democracy itself, animating practices that differ from those of, for example, a liberal democracy. The concept of the “umpire state” captures the logic of a neoliberal democracy: in an umpire state, “state actions seek to facilitate a competitive ‘game’ designed to enable players to pursue their own private agendas” (Barandiarán 2018, p. 198). This state is “enacted through state agencies that are limited in scope and analytic capacities as well as science that has been turned into a market commodity and low-​status activity” (Barandiarán 2018, p. 191). This concept combines the STS idiom of co-​production—​how we know and represent nature is inseparable from how we choose to live in it (Jasanoff 2004)—​with our growing understanding of neoliberal democracy (Brown 2009; Mirowski 2019). In a neoliberal democracy, the state has no apparent interests beyond enforcing the rules of the game; unlike corporations, it cannot “game” markets in its favor to protect citizens or advance their welfare. The umpire state is epistemically hollowed out and democracy demoted to market transactions, including for votes. The practice of EIAs in Chile illustrates how the umpire state operates. EIAs require developers to submit a scientific assessment of the anticipated environmental impacts of a project before receiving building and operating permits (Glasson et al. 2012). State

60   Javiera Barandiarán agencies then weigh this information against the project’s benefits when deciding whether to approve an EIA. As described by a US judge in an early legal case involving EIAs, a decision should result from “a fine-​tuned and systematic balancing analysis” (Milazzo 2006, p. 137). Simply, EIAs require state regulators to play a reflexive role, actively considering the information provided to them to reach a meditated decision that adjudicates between the competing interests of local communities, developers, and broader society (Pope et al. 2013; Aedo and Parker 2020). In Chile, state regulators include officials working at various state agencies that oversee EIAs (e.g., CONAMA, described later, as well as separate agencies that each manage water, agriculture, geological and mining resources, forests, fisheries and coastal waters, and others. See Barandiarán 2018, p. 36–​38, for a detailed description of EIA procedures in Chile). By contrast to this active, reflexive state, the Chilean state has often acted as an umpire in EIA decisions (Barandiarán 2018). Rather than carefully consider the information presented in light of constituents’ competing interests, Chilean officials typically aspired to neutrally enforce the rules. For instance, in 2011, state officials had to decide whether to approve or reject the EIA application presented by a large hydroelectric project called HidroAysén based on their analysis of thousands of pages of scientific information and comments by frontline communities. As with other EIAs in Chile, activists complained that the state was ignoring scientific evidence demonstrating that the supposed benefits (cheaper electricity) were not worth the costs (environmental destruction in Patagonia, a rare region yet unspoiled by industrialization) (on HidroAysén, see Schaeffer and Smits 2015; for criticism of EIAs in Chile, see Sepúlveda and Villarroel 2012; Tecklin et al. 2011). This was sufficient reason, they believed, for state officials to reject the EIA. But officials countered that their decision could only be based on legal considerations. The director of the EIA explained, We do our work remaining attached to what the law dictates. We are governed by public law that tells us that we can only do what the law allows us, not what we are forbidden from doing, as is the case with the private sector. Everything we do occurs within this regulated framework, which is why rather than voting [on an EIA decision] with our conscience we must vote following the letter of the law. (Quoted in Barandiarán 2018, p. 186)

In this example, the official responsible for HidroAysén’s EIA brushed aside the scientific information and public input provided through the EIA and instead justified the decision by appealing to the “letter of the law.” There is no “fine-​tuned and systematic balancing analysis,” only legal dictates. Such legal formalism is advanced by policy-​makers who propose regulating every aspect of EIAs—​the timeline, what counts as an environmental impact, the allowed scientific methodologies, the prescribed responses—​so that “nothing is subjective in any sense,” as stated by another Chilean EIA official (Barandiarán 2018, p. 186). The concept of the umpire state is an ideal, not a prescribed set of policies nor an end goal. Indeed, as the 2019 uprisings demonstrate, within Chilean society there is significant push-​back against neoliberal democracy. Regarding HidroAysén, although it was first approved, its EIA permits were later revoked. Some state officials involved in EIAs rejected the umpire state ideal, demanding more and better environmental studies to raise questions and provide evidence of the severity of the project’s anticipated impacts. In short, this episode illustrates that the progress of neoliberalism on the ground is uneven, varied, and

Assessing 30 Years of Neoliberal Environmental Management    61 contested at the same time that it poses deep transformations to democracy itself (Randalls 2010; Lave et al. 2010a; Dondanville and Dougherty 2020). Chile’s umpire state is rooted in its 1980 Constitution, written by the military regime of Augusto Pinochet, who came to power in 1973 through a violent coup. The military regime and its long-​lasting constitution dramatically changed Chilean society and politics by marginalizing the state from the role it historically played in economic and political life. For decades prior, the Chilean state played an active role in national development—​for instance, building hydroelectric dams and public transit infrastructure (see contributions in Chastain and Lorek 2020). But such direct involvement came to an end during the 1970s and 1980s, when the military government privatized state-​owned assets and imposed structural reforms like deregulation and fiscal discipline (Silva 1996; Liverman and Vilas 2006; Bustos et al. 2014; Tironi and Barandiarán 2014). The 1980 Constitution provided the legal foundations for these structural reforms and introduced also a central organizing idea: the “subsidiary principle,” which stipulates that the state is subordinate to private initiative (Ferrada 2000). When the official quoted earlier said, “we [state officials] are governed by public law that tells us that we can only do what the law allows us, not what we are forbidden from doing, as is the case with the private sector,” he was referencing the subsidiary principle. Coupled with privatization, strong property rights, and a prostrate legislature, this principle elevates markets to the fore of human activity and relegates the state to the role of enabling markets. The umpire state thus buys scientific advice, including that used in EIAs, through markets.

Creating Markets for Environmental Science The creation of markets for science is a global phenomenon, extending well beyond Chile. STS scholars study the commercialization of science as the processes by which scientific knowledge is turned into a commodity to be bought and sold through markets (Fernández 2015). In the United States, the commercialization of science is changing university finance (Mirowski 2011), data collection (Randalls 2010), patenting practices (Birch 2017; Lander 2008), and environmental regulation (Lave et al. 2010a). Evidence of commercialization exists also in Latin America (Blair 2019; Smith 2017; Sanz 2020) and within entities with global operations, such as social entrepreneurs developing humanitarian devices (Redfield 2016). Scholars have also examined the ways in which scientists sponsored by industry have advocated for markets so as to displace other ways of validating science (Oreskes and Conway 2011; Miller 2017; Nik-​Khah 2014). A common finding across the studies just cited is that traditional scientific institutions, like peer review, are losing influence as scientific work changes owing to the increase in corporate funding for research. This happens in a number of ways: scientists at public institutions do work that advances corporate interests (e.g., Nik-​Khah 2014; Fernández 2015), and more and more scientists work in a variety of “research organizations” created to advance private interests through science (e.g., Mirowski 2005). Similarly, private foundations increasingly search for and fund scientists

62   Javiera Barandiarán whose research advances their interests and are willing to attack research unfavorable to the foundation’s cause (Fernández 2015; Sasser 2018). The Chilean umpire state provides multiple examples of markets for science at work and echoes a common finding of the commercialization literature: markets for science are hurting trust in science and accentuating inequities in who has access to the information needed for policy-​making. Additionally, the concept of the umpire state provides a framework for understanding the importance of scientific commercialization for democratic governance by highlighting that science itself is not the only prize: rather, what is at stake as science is transformed into a market commodity is the scope and relative power of the state and markets (Miller 2017). Central to the umpire state is a neoliberal faith in markets as the only legitimate way of organizing human activity, including the production of knowledge. In 1988, long after the coup of 1973, Chileans denied Augusto Pinochet another 8 years in power in a referendum. This exceptional vote initiated a return to democracy and numerous changes—​including the approval in 1994 of Chile’s first environmental framework law and environmental agency, CONAMA. However, the new democracy retained the dictatorship-​era 1980 Constitution which, as noted earlier, enshrines the subsidiary principle that constrains state initiative in favor of private enterprise. It also protects rights to private property and free enterprise, including for instance “the right to open, organize and maintain an educational establishment” (Article 19.11). These constitutional provisions transformed Chilean science and universities. As CONAMA got started, Japan’s national aid agency, known as JICA, offered to fund a National Center for the Environment (CENMA) to provide CONAMA with in-​house scientific advice. A group of individuals involved with the environmental framework law shared JICA’s interest and set to work (Barandiarán 2020a). However, they disagreed with JICA’s strategic vision: whereas JICA saw a need to provide CONAMA with in-​house scientific expertise, as environmental regulators have in Japan or in the United States, the Chilean officials involved in this case countered that the state could not have a privileged relationship with any one scientific laboratory—​this would violate the principles of competition and subsidiarity. CENMA was instead created as a private foundation. Deprived of in-​house capacities, CONAMA turned to purchasing through market mechanisms the scientific studies it needed. CONAMA, however, needed scientific expertise to identify environmental problems, propose pollution limits and environmental quality standards, and evaluate EIAs. EIAs became, over time, CONAMA’s primary tool for managing the environment; its legal faculties for drafting and enforcing quality and emission standards were weak, its political power when confronted by ministries was nonexistent, and it had no recourse to other policy tools, like land-​use planning, which can be used for managing the environment (Barandiarán 2016, 2018; Tecklin et al. 2011). Creating CENMA as a private foundation was the first of three ways in which policy-​ makers privatized environmental science during the democratic transition in Chile.2 A second way involved CONAMA’s Advisory Council, which could have been an expert body providing CONAMA with strategic, specialized advise rather than the representative body it became, with one member appointed by the president and two members each from academia, NGOs, business, labor, and consulting firms. This gave scientists an equal footing with consultants, drowning out the voice of academic scientists and augmenting that of consulting firms, which soon expanded their political influence. In EIAs, consultants do the bulk of the data collection and analysis. The Advisory Council could have been a space for

Assessing 30 Years of Neoliberal Environmental Management    63 academic scientists to assess that work for controversial or complex projects. Instead, the council had little practical importance for CONAMA’s work or EIAs (Barandiarán 2020a). Third, legislators established only a very small pot of funding for environmental research. Some legislators strenuously opposed creating a “special fund” for environmental research, saying this was discriminatory: instead, all activities should compete for general funds in accordance with market and subsidiary principles (Barandiarán 2018). When the Chilean state needs environmental information, it thus must buy this information through a regulated market.3 These tenders tend to be for short-​term, narrowly defined points of data. For instance, CENMA operated an air quality monitoring network across several cities until this project was transferred to the public market. Officials chose the cheaper bid from a small consulting start-​up whose data collection methods generated lots of invalid and missing data, without which the environmental authorities could not issue air quality warnings (Barandiarán 2018, pp. 51–​54). Moreover, the start-​up folded within a few years, and the time-​series data CENMA had collected, as well as the labs and multidisciplinary team of scientists, were lost. Without stable public funding, CENMA was unable to maintain scientific quality standards and, in 2019, after many years of volatile funding, the entire center closed (Ureta 2020). Like CENMA, universities are also forced to compete for scarce public research funds. The 1980 Constitution and a higher education law that followed led to a boom in new universities, creating a competitive market that has forced all universities to behave as if they are profit-​maximizing entities (Barandiarán 2012). These changes have impacted environmental science in several ways. First, scientists’ working conditions have grown increasingly precarious because universities provide few full-​time jobs, forcing many environmental scientists to work multiple jobs and supplement meagre university salaries with consulting work (Simbürger and Neary 2016). Research funding is so low that even those with stable university jobs sometimes covet large EIA projects, like HidroAysén (Barandiarán 2018). Indeed, for 30 years, government spending on research has held steady at less than 0.4 percent of GDP, compared to more than 2 percent spent by the world’s richest countries.4 The higher education market is also hurting the next generation of environmental scientists. Access to higher education is necessary for training new scientists. And equitable, affordable access is necessary for training individuals from nontraditional backgrounds, such as Indigenous students. However, Chile’s university market has saddled students with debt, which cannot be repaid on increasingly poor faculty or research salaries, thus increasing pressure on these students to accept better-​paid industry jobs (Monckeberg 2007). The commercialization of universities and science thus produces a smaller, less diverse environmental scientific community (Chiappa and Perez Mejias 2019). Numerous scandals have also rocked universities. Rather than paying for instruction or student services, student fees have been spent on the advertising needed to attract new customers and on real estate (Monckeberg 2007). At several universities, CEOs used tuition to pay mortgages on university buildings: while students acquired a lifetime-​worth of debt subsidized by the state’s loan program, university shareholders gained ownership of valuable properties (Monckeberg 2007). In addition, several universities bribed the national accreditation agency created to verify educational quality (Torres and Riquelme 2011). The bribing of the national accreditation agency illustrates another common trait of neoliberal interventions: they often backfire or work in contradictory ways, not only in Chile but around the world. For example, contracts meant to distinguish China’s public

64   Javiera Barandiarán health industry from science did the opposite (Greenhalgh 2016); competitive markets in the United States have tended toward monopoly or oligopoly as companies strategically privatize science to promote their interests (Mirowski 2018; Fernández 2015); and globally, policies that seem democratic, like EIAs or Open Science platforms, promote vacuous forms of public participation (Mirowski 2018; for Chile, see Tironi and Barandiarán 2014; Ureta 2017). This phenomenon is captured in the concept of neoliberalism as a “political technology”; that is, as embodied, applied expertise used to pragmatically and purposefully transform the state and society (Tironi and Barandiarán 2014). These transformations are eroding public trust in science, and, as detailed next, this cannot be easily reverted. On the contrary, Chilean environmental scientists’ efforts to promote trust in science often failed to work as expected.

Markets for Science Breed Distrust STS scholars use the concept of “boundary work” to analyze how scientists and their interlocutors assert the credibility of a knowledge claim by delineating science from different versions of pseudo-​science or “bad” science (Gieryn 1999). This is a common practice worldwide. For example, in a recent study of China’s public healthcare agencies, Susan Greenhalgh (2016) finds scientists attempting to uphold their reputations by delineating their work as “ethical” as opposed to the “unethical” pseudo-​science sponsored by the pharmaceutical industry. A recent study of climate science in the United States finds that, after the federal government slashed funding for climate change research, the scientists who had previously received funding began distinguishing “done” science from “better” science to rationalize having to prematurely abandon their research projects (Jeon 2019). Boundary work can be rhetorical, as in the preceding examples, or it can happen through formal mechanisms like codes of conduct, contracts, and design guidelines (Lave 2012; Barandiarán 2018). However, these often fail to work as expected, in part because “the mechanisms of corporate influence, operating at organizational and individual levels, are often subtle and deliberately concealed, as actors in the neoliberal knowledge economy struggle to meet market imperatives while ensuring that their products appear value-​free” (Greenhalgh 2016, p. 486). For many decades prior to the advent of neoliberalism, scientists’ credibility has depended on projecting an appearance of being both relevant to society and autonomous from politics or business (Brown 2009; Guston 2000; Beigel 2013). As the case of Chile shows, scientists who appear to be working for industry often struggle to retain the credibility needed to speak to issues of public concern, like environmental protections. Chilean scientists hired to work on EIAs became increasingly indistinguishable from consultants. To defend their epistemic authority, they used boundary work, often with unsatisfactory or contradictory results. The following examples are taken from Science and Environment in Chile (Barandiarán 2018), which examines the politics of scientific advice in EIAs across four industry sectors to identify patterns in how scientists participate in this all-​important policy for environmental management. When it came to hiring scientists for EIAs and related monitoring studies, many state officials, activists, and industry insiders believed scientists were “opportunistic,” that is, that their need for funding would lead them

Assessing 30 Years of Neoliberal Environmental Management    65 to accept jobs they were unqualified or unequipped to do. Nevertheless, officials, activists, and industry still hired scientists when they needed to reassure skeptical publics of the legitimacy of their claims—​after all, a scientific opinion was required in EIAs. Thus, industry hired scientists alongside consultants for EIAs they anticipated would be controversial, like HidroAysén. Activists, likewise, hired scientists when seeking to contest the environmental damage of a large project, like that of the Pascua Lama mine on glaciers. And state officials turned to scientists when forced to weigh-​in on these disputes. The Pascua Lama mine case illustrates how widely divergent industry, state, and activists views were on what makes credible scientists. While activists refused to hire any scientist who had ever worked for the mining industry, state officials actively sought out scientists with industry experience. Only corporations looked at scientists’ academic credentials to judge their credibility—​the traditional barometer of a scientist’s credibility (Guston 2000). Across all the EIA projects, industry staff believed they could safeguard scientists’ credibility through the contracts they signed for EIA work; to industry staff, these contracts guaranteed scientific freedom, but to scientists they did just the opposite by limiting the time, methods, and scope of their work. In short, contracts failed to legally distinguish scientists from consultants and contributed to deep distrust in science. Many scientists found themselves fielding accusations of “selling out” to industry and producing results favorable to their patron’s interests. Chilean scientists turned to different forms of boundary work to field these accusations. One common strategy was to claim to do narrow tasks of seemingly unassailable objectivity, like keeping an inventory of nature. For HidroAysen’s EIA, for instance, scientists rationalized their EIA studies by claiming they were merely documenting what was there (see also Barandiarán 2020b). Another strategy involved claiming an exaggerated humility; in a case against a paper and pulp mill accused of toxic pollution, scientists said that “science produces probabilities, not truths” to defend their work. Most frequently, scientists tried to assert their credibility by appealing to the scientific method and other traditional scientific practices, like peer review. But these appeals often failed, either due to distrust over private funding or because they reified science into a seemingly “mechanical” activity (Porter 1995). These efforts to delineate science from other things, like consulting work, did not overcome widespread distrust of science and likely only accentuated this distrust. For instance, regulators at Chile’s fisheries agency distrusted ocean monitoring data because they were convinced scientists and consultants held conflicts of interest that led them to manipulate the data. Activists distrusted projections of damages to glaciers because they suspected scientists were beholden to industry. In short, in a society governed by a market for science, environmental scientists cannot escape the suspicion that conflicts of interest compromise their independence and the credibility of their work. Their attempts to delineate science from consulting work make them appear equivocal and narrow to the point of irrelevance, further eroding public trust in science. These traits reinforce Chile’s neoliberal umpire state: the old ideal of a competent state with the resources and know-​how to intervene in the world cedes to a neoliberal ideal of a subsidiary state that arbitrates, as if a neutral umpire, between privately produced knowledge claims. In the umpire state, officials have access neither to trusted advisors nor good data; plagued by a sense that they lack the knowledge needed to make decisions, they appear woefully incompetent. This undermines their confidence to protect the environment through standard policies, like EIAs.

66   Javiera Barandiarán

An Increasingly Deteriorated Environment Since the 1990s, Chile’s umpire state oversaw the accelerated deterioration of the environment (Bustos et al. 2014), which state agencies have struggled to document given their reliance on piecemeal scientific data purchased from disparate and suspect consultants. In 2016, the nation’s flagship public university, the University of Chile, published a comprehensive assessment of environmental changes between 1999 and 2015 (Universidad de Chile 2016). This report highlights the multiple challenges facing the Chilean environment, including the existence of knowledge gaps that undermine regulation and policy-​making and that provide further evidence of the failures of Chile’s market for environmental science. The University of Chile’s scientists found that, between 1990 and 2015, environmental quality had worsened. Air quality across nearly all of Chile’s cities and mining areas has failed to meet standards for particulate matter (PM10), nitrogen dioxide (NO2), ozone, and other pollutants; only coastal cities like Puerto Montt, Antofagasta, and La Serena have been spared. Water quality had deteriorated in streams throughout the mining-​rich north and across the vast majority of Chile’s lakes. Native forests continued to be replaced by tree plantations and pastures. Deforestation estimates ranged from 237,000 and 314,000 hectares, while desertification affected about 20 percent of the national territory (Universidad de Chile 2016, p. 173). This is bad news for biodiversity: plant and animal species facing some threat of extinction had increased by 171 percent (Universidad de Chile 2016, p. 224). And catch fisheries were down: declines of more than 70 percent for pelagic species, 82 percent for those near the sea floor, and 45 percent for crustaceans (Universidad de Chile 2016, p. 388). Greenhouse gas emissions, diesel use, waste, and agricultural run-​off were all up. Solid waste, for instance, increased from 11.6 million tons to 16.9 million tons, with most of the increase coming from industry (Universidad de Chile 2016, p. 518). Climate change has compounded these trends: average precipitation is down, glacier melt is up, and nearly all dams contained less water—​on average, 40 percent less in 2015 compared to 1999 (Universidad de Chile 2016, p. 133). The University of Chile’s scientists also pointed to multiple knowledge gaps that make regulation difficult. For example, estimates of native forest coverage were highly suspect because of inconsistencies in the definitions and measures used by the state agency responsible for forest protection (Universidad de Chile 2016, p. 208). How much native forest is consumed as firewood is unknown, because in 2011 the energy agency stopped counting this, although most of Chile’s south relies on firewood for heating (Universidad de Chile 2016, p. 210). Water consumption is a major concern, particularly throughout the arid, mineral-​rich north; yet there are no data on total water consumption by the mining industry (Universidad de Chile 2016, p. 417). Conservation scientists called 1999–​2015 a “lost decade” because negligible progress was made in biodiversity research (Universidad de Chile 2016, p. 239). They concluded, “recurrent deficiencies in how EIAs are applied, legal manipulations that occur with EIAs, and the low priority given to biodiversity in EIAs, have led to species loss and ecosystem deterioration. Even if political willingness to change this negative situation existed, this state of affairs is aggravated due to an inadequate diagnosis

Assessing 30 Years of Neoliberal Environmental Management    67 of the causes and efficacy of regulatory tools, which lead to many ineffective interventions that are just ‘good wishes’ ” (Universidad de Chile 2016, p. 240). In summary, the University of Chile’s report denounced various ways in which insufficient scientific data from deforestation rates to water use by specific industries has stymied environmental protection and regulation efforts. Chilean scientists working to reduce urban air pollution have made similar complaints (Gallardo et al. 2018). Conversely, scholars found that one of Chile’s most successful environmental regulations—​to reduce arsenic emissions from copper smelters—​can be explained in part by an exceptional collaboration between science and regulators coupled with international pressure from competitors and domestic pressures to legitimate the new democracy (Ibarra et al. 2018). As Ibarra and her co-​authors note, this case was exceptional for a number of reasons, including the timing: during the new democracy’s early years (early 1990s), industry actors and officials from various state ministries and agencies were willing to put their differences aside and work toward a consensus to legitimate the new democracy. They saw environmental science as an ally in that effort and funded a competent and committed team of scientists at the University of Chile to assist them. Regulation could have gone otherwise, as the Mining Ministry initially opposed arsenic emission caps. But, just as Chile’s new democracy needed local legitimacy, copper exporters needed global legitimacy; all these factors aligned to enable this one regulatory success. The distinction between data and credible data is crucial, as Chilean glaciology science illustrates. The University of Chile report identified glaciology as one area where scientific knowledge has improved since 1999, largely due to the conflict at the Pascua Lama mine, which exposed rising threats to glaciers posed by mining (Barandiarán 2020b). In the late 2000s, state authorities began compiling a national inventory of glaciers to ensure their inclusion in EIAs—​which did not occur with Pascua Lama—​as well as requiring extensive glacier monitoring plans from mining operations. Yet the inventory and monitoring plans have been mired in controversy, with glaciologists disagreeing on who should collect data (scientists or consultants) and what the data is useful for (preventing damages or merely documenting them after they occur) (Barandiarán 2018, 2020b). In short, though glaciology data have increased, its credibility and relevance are contested even by some scientists and state officials involved in its production who appear to recognize that commercialized scientific data have fostered distrust and produced data that are not useful to regulators in different state agencies tasked with protecting glaciers from mining and climate change (Barandiarán 2020b; Taillant 2015; Ureta et al. 2020).

Neoliberalism as Political Rationality Markets are at the center of neoliberalism, whether they be for science or for elements of nature, like carbon, water, or ecosystem services (Liverman and Vilas 2006). These markets do not exist in opposition to the state; rather, they rely on its resources and institutions. The STS concept of “market devices” captures this dynamic. Market devices are “the material and discursive assemblages that intervene in the construction of markets,” assemblages which draw on state resources and organizations that employ experts, create data, enforce rules, and advance theories about how markets “should” operate (Muniesa et al. 2007, p. 2;

68   Javiera Barandiarán Lave et al. 2010a). Carbon markets, invented by states in the 2000s, are a prime example; in Chile (Ureta 2013) and the European Union (MacKenzie 2009) experts have struggled to transform carbon emissions into a commodity that fulfills textbook definitions of how markets work. The centrality of markets is captured in the following four principles, which synthesize the political rationality at the heart of neoliberalism. During the 1990s, the World Bank forced onto countries a series of policies in exchange for loans; these were called “structural reform” or, by critics, neoliberalism (Harvey 2005; Grindle 1997; Svampa 2019). However, neoliberalism is an intellectual effort, and therefore more dynamic, contested, and ambitious than the World Bank’s policy recipes suggest (Lave et al. 2010b; Ossandon 2019; Mirowski and Plehwe 2009). 1. The market is an “arbiter of truth.” Friedrich Hayek (1945), an economist considered the “father” of neoliberalism, described the market as an “information processor” greater than any human organization—​and certainly better than central planners in large state bureaucracies popular during the 1940s. This principle underpins the commercialization of science observed in Chile and elsewhere (Mirowski 2019). 2. Market failures can be solved by more markets. While neoclassical economists proposed solving market failures through taxes or subsidies, neoliberals favor market mechanisms, like school vouchers or carbon markets (MacLean 2017; Vettese 2019). This justifies extending property rights which, once established, are treated as “sacred”—​this is the case, for example, with property rights for water in Chile (Bauer 1998). 3. The self is an entrepreneur who manages their own human capital, deciding where to invest it and taking responsibility for any failures (Brown 2015). In Chile, the implications of this shift are evident in how individuals approach mental health and anti-​poverty policies (Han 2012) or in how policy-​makers imagined “citizens” when designing a new public transit system (Ureta 2015). 4. The state creates and sustains markets. States sustain markets by producing information about prices and costs, funding those systems that provide judicial certainty, and maintaining law and order, all while limiting state capacities in other areas. Chile’s subsidiary principle expresses this principle, which guides not only environmental and science policies as discussed here, but also national development. For instance, the Chilean state has withdrawn almost completely from industrial policy (Bril-​ Mascarenhas and Madariaga 2019).

Constitutional Reform: What Can Chile Learn from Ecuador? This chapter opened with the 2019 uprising against Chile’s neoliberal democracy, when anger with inequalities and injustices led to a historic pact to pursue constitutional reform. The 1980 Constitution symbolizes a repressive military regime and also puts into practice a neoliberal democracy, which is epistemically hollowed, operates through markets, and—​as

Assessing 30 Years of Neoliberal Environmental Management    69 this section analyzes—​creates a “limited democracy” in which citizens’ votes do not translate into a representative legislature, legislative majorities are not large enough to approve reform bills, and reforms that restrict markets or “free enterprise” in any way are discarded as “unconstitutional” (Pinto 2019). Constitutional reform in Chile should take inspiration from Ecuador’s 2008 Constitution, arguably the world’s most progressive attempt at a democratic, social order (Becker 2011). Its provisions regarding Indigenous peoples, nature, and the role of the state have the potential to democratize science, reverting the negative impacts of its commercialization detailed in this chapter and laying the foundations for a more accountable and engaged scientific community. Before discussing Ecuador’s constitution, it is important to understand how Chile’s 1980 Constitution has restricted democracy. Reflecting on 30 years of neoliberal democracy, renowned historian Julio Pinto (2019) summarized that Chileans have learned that their votes do not translate into representation, let alone reform. In May 2019, polling found the lowest levels of trust in institutions since 1990: fewer than 20 percent of Chileans trusted the judiciary, political parties, or legislators.5 The reasons lie in the following constitutional laws which together create what Friedrich Hayek called a “limited democracy”: 1. Creates a subsidiary state, which is subordinate to private initiative (Fermandois 2006) and acts as an umpire, as noted earlier. Subsidiarity stems out of jurisprudence and several articles (e.g., Articles 1 and 19), including Article 19.21 that recognizes the individual “right to undertake any economic activity” (for a critical analysis see Ferrada 2000; Ruiz-​Tagle 2000; Vallejo and Pardow 2008). 2. Limits legislative authority by requiring “supermajorities” of around 60 percent in each legislative chamber to reform the constitution and 18 organic laws that regulate the most important matters of public life, including education and mining. Moreover, legislative decisions can be overridden by the Constitutional Tribunal, composed of political appointees, and the President, who has strong legislative powers and exclusive authority to adopt international treaties (Huneeus 2018). 3. Limits voting rights by restricting forms of direct democracy and (until 2017) imposing a “binomial” electoral system, which led to an overrepresentation of the right-​wing coalition at the expense of third-​party candidates. Constitutional interventions are neoliberals’ preferred way of advancing their skepticism of democracy, which they claimed would lead to totalitarianism (Biebricher 2019; Cornelissen 2017; MacLean 2017; Mirowski 2019; Fermandois 2006). These views are laid out in foundational neoliberal texts, including Friedrich Hayek’s The Constitution of Liberty (1960), Milton Friedman’s Capitalism and Freedom (1962), and James Buchanan’s The Limits of Liberty (1975), where he introduced the term “constitutional economics.” Hayek argued that political participation had to be limited given the cognitive impairments of average citizens and the superiority of the market as an information processor (Mirowski 2019). For Buchanan, the only “free” society was one based on unanimity, achieved during the constitutional moment and sustained by a constitution which places “locks and bolts” on democracy to protect the “minority rights” of even one person (MacLean 2017). Friedman, Hayek, and Buchanan each promoted their views when they visited Chile between the late 1970s and 1981, invited by a coalition of neoliberal economists and gremialistas—​this is a Catholic right-​wing movement that advocated for an “apolitical” society where “intermediate entities

70   Javiera Barandiarán could fulfill the functions that were natural to them” (Muñoz 2016, p. 50). In synthesis, the 1980 Constitution melds gremialismo with neoliberalism to create a neoliberal democracy in which environmental protection and human activities are governed through private property and markets overseen by an umpire state and in which legislative reform by democratic means is almost impossible (Huneeus 2000; Valdivia 2006, 2003; Pinto 2019). A new social order thus requires constitutional reform. By contrast to the umpire state, Ecuador’s 2008 Constitution redefines the role of the state toward ensuring dignity, welfare, and a safe and sustainable environment, guided by the Indigenous concept of “good living” (from the original in Quechua, sumak kawsay) (Ortiz and Mayorga 2012; Kauffman and Martin 2014). A global pioneer, this foundational law recognizes the RoN, a doctrine which could fundamentally transform how non-​humans participate in government and, in the process, democratize science (see Kauffman’s chapter, this volume). RoN doctrines can protect nature from being commodified, as rights-​bearing subjects cannot be as easily sold for someone’s profit, and create conditions for non-​humans to defend their interests in court, independently of various human interests in nature (Kauffman and Martin 2018; Cano Pecharroman 2018; Albornoz 2013). If nature can speak for itself in courts of law, why not also in laboratories? Elevating the epistemic authority of non-​humans would force a revision of every aspect of teaching, research, planning, industry, and consumption and result in a radical reimagining of the scientific enterprise, one that would see in nature an equal rather than a subordinate to be controlled or improved to meet human goals (Valladares and Boelens 2017). RoN might also be the best challenge against the extension of markets. In the United States, for example, corporations are treated as “fictional persons” for legal purposes, with Supreme Court decisions even recognizing corporate citizenship rights like free speech (Kirsch 2014). At a minimum, constitutional RoN should mean a more equitable legal representation of nature and corporations in courts, as opposed to the asymmetric contests common today (Kauffman and Martin 2016). More ambitiously, non-​humans could be recognized as having also ownership rights or other entitlements that might skew markets in their favor. For example, if aquifers were recognized as having ownership rights, Chile’s market for water rights would have to pay them for water use. These payments could go into a fund for reparations or local actions, such as projects, studies, conservation, or water-​saving equipment for households. Corporate users would have to pay aquifers a fair price, rather than a pittance, as often occurred when water rights were first issued. Finally, elevating the epistemic authority of non-​humans could challenge the privatization of knowledge about nature, thus countering the commodification of life enabled by neoliberal science (Lander 2008; Birch 2017; Albornoz 2013) and challenging dominant asymmetries that subordinate non-​humans to the status of simple property that exists for other’s benefit. These transformations are admittedly difficult to put into practice; they require, among other things, new methods for listening and documenting nature, as well as new forms of accountability and representation (for work in this direction, see Ureta et al. 2020; Lee and Newfont 2017). And the goal is ambitious—​to overhaul existing relations between the environment and corporations, science, and society. Such uncertainties and possibilities are precisely what makes Chile’s constitutional reform exciting, taking place as it does against a background of profound awareness of climate change, environmental collapse, and new ways of thinking about the economy and environment.

Assessing 30 Years of Neoliberal Environmental Management    71 Ecuador’s 2008 Constitution has the potential to democratize science also by forcing more inclusive forms of citizen participation to dismantle systemic injustices. In centering Indigenous worldviews, Ecuador’s constitution took the first step in redressing the historic exclusion of Indigenous peoples from education and better-​paid jobs in science, government, and industry (Akchurin 2015; Valladares and Boelens 2017). This has brought material benefits to individuals from historically marginalized communities (Andolina et al. 2009), but it potentially has great epistemic and democratic importance. Sociologist of science Michel Callon and colleagues (2012) have noted that one of the great asymmetries in modern societies is that between experts and lay citizens, who have historically been excluded from scientific decision-​making and from processes designed to hold science accountable. Recent years have seen many efforts to democratize science through grassroots-​ led citizen science, government or university-​organized consensus conferences, creative uses of performance, and others (Baigorrotegui 2019; Ottinger 2017; Callon et al. 2012; Chilvers and Kearnes 2016; Partridge et al. 2017). Indigenous peoples across South America have been asserting their epistemic authority with increasing success (de la Cadena 2015; Valladares and Boelens 2017; Li 2015; Leyva 2018). For instance, they have pointed to the fact that Indigenous lands of the Amazon forest have lower deforestation and higher carbon storage than non-​Indigenous lands as proof that Indigenous knowledges may hold the key to effective environmental policies that defy neoliberalism and sustain a healthy environment (Blackman and Veit, 2018; Cifuentes 2017; see also Martello 2001). Only 13 years into this new constitutional regime, it is too early to assess how far science–​ society relations in Ecuador have advanced toward these ideals. Ecuadorian courts are slowly incorporating RoN doctrines into their decisions (Kauffman and Martin 2016), Indigenous individuals are occupying more positions of authority (Andolina et al. 2009), and Indigenous communities have won important victories in their centuries-​old struggle to reclaim rights to land and water (Partridge 2017; Kauffman and Martin 2014). Poverty and inequality have fallen, with Ecuador’s richest 1 percent taking less than 17 percent of total income, compared to 25 percent in Chile (Cano 2018). Nevertheless, many households are vulnerable to economic shocks, and successive governments have yet to figure out how Ecuador’s economy can rely less on mining and industrial agriculture (Svampa 2019). STS scholars complain that government investments in new universities and laboratories retain an extractivist logic that aims to patent and commercialize the nation’s biodiversity, in contradiction to the new constitutional principles (Albornoz 2013; Chavez and Gaybor 2018; Wilson and Bayón 2017). In short, society has only begun the process of transforming RoN and “good living” into practice. To help in this endeavor, STS scholars should be asking, What kind of civic epistemology does a state have that recognizes RoN? Civic epistemology refers to the institutionalized ways in which a society and its governing entities know things collectively; it includes paying attention to how knowledge is made official and how shared meanings are produced (Jasanoff 2005). Civic epistemologies are culturally and bureaucratically entrenched; they change slowly. Efforts to describe this new, nature-​recentered civic epistemology should consider questions like how to eschew evaluating government investments in science and laboratories on a linear success–​failure spectrum and how to integrate questions of democracy into studies of economic growth (Gómez-​Urrego 2019). They should take more seriously the real shortcomings of citizen participation that some scholars are finding (Pestre 2008; Mirowski 2018; Gregory 2017) and contribute to developing new models for scientists

72   Javiera Barandiarán to participate in democracy (Lahsen 2016; Meehan et al. 2018). One alternative is to conceptualize scientists as members of a “critical community” that is diverse and strongly accountable to others: communities, citizens, and state agencies, but also to rights-​bearing nature (Miller 1998; Barandiarán 2018).

Conclusion Chile’s post-​1990 neoliberal democracy has produced alarming levels of distrust in democracy and its institutions, including environmental science. Improving environmental protection and arresting continued pollution and degradation requires moving away from neoliberal democracy, which has hamstrung state regulatory and scientific capacities and democratic accountability while fostering market-​driven inequities and injustices. The path away from neoliberal democracy requires revitalizing the democratic state by recognizing the RoN and redefining the role of the state in public life—​from that of an umpire to a defender of dignity. Democracy needs to be reintroduced into Chile’s constitution by making voting rights bulletproof, strengthening the legislature’s legitimacy, increasing the modes and diversity of political participation, and cultivating locally embedded and accountable scientific communities. These measures can also democratize science, a necessary step for improving environmental protection. Democratizing science requires building relationships of strong accountability among rights-​bearing human and non-​human actors and state and government agencies, based not on the transparent transmission of data collected by private parties, but on deliberations carried out among parties with mutual respect for each others’ epistemic autonomy and authority. Scientists are crucial to these efforts to revitalize democracy, not as subordinates to corporate interests nor as unaccountable overseers, but as members of a critical community guided by humility, deliberation, and accountability to peoples and rights-​bearing nature.

Notes 1. Data on education are available at https://​data.oecd.org/​edur​esou​rce/​priv​ate-​spend​ing-​ on-​educat​ion.htm. Data on health are available at https://​data.oecd.org/​health​res/​hea​lth-​ spend​ing.htm. Accessed June 17, 2020. 2. See Barandiarán 2018, pp. 22–​31, for a detailed discussion of how the Chilean case compares to other countries. In short, elements of the Chilean experience are found elsewhere (e.g., in Peru, but not in Argentina). International organizations, like the World Bank and JICA, have attempted similar programs elsewhere (e.g., Vietnam, Mexico), also with mixed results. 3. See https://​www.mer​cado​publ​ico.cl/​Home 4. In 2019, Chile’s gross domestic product (GDP) was US$476 million, greater than that of Ireland or Czech Republic. Yet Chile spent significantly less than both on research and development (R&D): 0.35 percent of GDP compared to almost 1 percent in Ireland and 1.93 percent in Czech Republic (in 2018). Per capita, Chile’s 2019 GDP was just below that of Turkey or Russia (US$25,000 vs. US$28–​29,000) yet both of these countries spent

Assessing 30 Years of Neoliberal Environmental Management    73 more than twice on R&D than Chile (about 1 percent of GDP). Data on Research and Development spending are available at https://​data.oecd.org/​rd/​gross-​domes​tic-​spend​ ing-​on-​r-​d.htm. Accessed June 23, 2020. 5. Result from May 2019, “Barómetro de la Política,” MoriChile, accessed February 8, 2020 at http://​morich​ile.cl/​barome​tro-​de-​la-​polit​ica-​mayo-​2019/​.

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Chapter 4

Environm e nt a nd Devel op me nt

Crossing the Divide Between Global South and Global North Kathryn Hochstetler A binary division between a Global South and a Global North—​developing and developed countries—​has been a major organizing component of the study and practice of global environmental politics. Early international environmental negotiations, for example, were often framed as meetings where highly engaged Northerners confronted resistant Southerners (Miller 1995; Najam 2005). In the same way, the first generations of study of comparative environmental politics often proceeded as though all environmental politics and policy were unfolding in the Global North, with the Global South at most receiving actors, funds, and impulses from the other side of the world. These characterizations were not wholly arbitrary, as developing countries did express serious concerns about whether their national development priorities left space for a global environmental agenda and vice versa. Similarly, much of the institutional apparatus of environmental politics did appear later in the Global South than in the North. Yet global environmental actors have increasingly questioned this binary division at the international level. The climate negotiations have notably, if controversially, left behind Kyoto’s strict division between Annex I and non-​Annex I countries (Voight and Ferreira 2016). The G-​77 of 134 developing countries and China notoriously conceals really significant differences in interests and experiences (Barnett 2008). Theoretically, scholars have also proposed that rising powers like the BASIC countries (Brazil, China, India, and South Africa) are challenging not just the negotiations but our understandings of global order and hierarchy (Hochstetler and Milkoreit 2015; Hurrell 2007). And it was never easy to fit certain countries and regions, like those of Central Asia or the Middle East, into a binary division of global countries (Sowers et al. 2011; Weinthal 2002). The equivalent revelation has not yet fully come to the study of comparative environmental politics, but this chapter asserts that it should. To offer just one example, watching the Trump administration dismantle as much as it can of the United States’ historically world-​ leading environmental bureaucracy is very much like watching the Bolsonaro

82   Kathryn Hochstetler administration in Brazil as it takes apart the bureaucratic tools that began to control deforestation after 2003. The fact that one is in the Global North and the other in the Global South is some of the least informative knowledge to have about these processes. The study of comparative environmental politics needs to make better sense of the far from binary diversity of contemporary environmental politics. This chapter argues that such an agenda would begin by widening the range of topics political scientists study about developing countries beyond the current heavy focus on forests and natural resources—​ crucial topics, but just a subset of relevant ones. And it should study them in a larger number of countries. Not only would these changes give us a better understanding of the developing countries themselves, but it would also contribute to better understanding of topics now mostly studied in the advanced democracies, like federalism, political parties, social provision, the role of political institutions, and other themes central to comparative politics itself. Ultimately, this approach would require a different framing of the long-​standing environment and development debates, which is where the chapter concludes.

Comparative Politics and Environmental Politics The discipline of political science has long shown little interest in environmental politics. It is rarely covered in major disciplinary and subfield journals despite the fact that environmental topics like climate change are recognized as some of the most urgent policy issues of our time, including by scholars (Green and Hale 2017). There is even less coverage of comparative environmental politics (Cao et al. 2014; Purdon 2015). For example, from 2015 to 2020, Comparative Political Studies, Comparative Politics, and World Politics together published just five articles on environmental politics of any kind anywhere. Thus, this handbook will play an important role in consolidating the current status and future agenda of environmental topics in the field. But what role do and should studies of environmental politics in developing countries in particular play in that research agenda? One of the most ambitious past efforts to lay out an agenda that links the study of comparative politics and environmental politics does not, in fact, foreground the distinction between developing and developed countries (Steinberg and VanDeveer 2012a, 2012b). As such, it provides a good foundation for the argument laid out here. Looking a little more deeply, however, the book continues to have a divide between developed and developing countries, with chapters devoted either to one or the other side of the development divide, with only Central and Eastern Europe appearing on both sides (Steinberg and VanDeveer 2012c, p. 17). This reflects an ongoing differentiation of research agendas between those who study the comparative environmental politics of the Global South versus the Global North. This differentiation is particularly sharp when regions—​Europe, Latin America, Africa—​ are generally either wealthier or poorer. Scholars of Europe or other wealthy countries, for example, have particularly extensive collections of empirical materials that have been produced by both wealthy democratic governments and generations of scholarship. These have allowed the use of a larger methodological toolbox and generated theoretical frameworks later applied elsewhere. Doctoral training for students of such regions is very

Environment and Development    83 different from that for regions and countries where information is scarce and scholars might struggle to find appropriate theories and methodologies (Barkin, this volume). Few political scientists take on research across the divide, although more do so in more diverse regions like the Middle East. The several chapters of this volume that do so represent a major step forward (e.g., Ivanova et al. this volume; Chu and Shi, this volume). More generally, to make the argument in broad strokes, study of the comparative environmental politics of the Global North has a wide scope and is comparatively well-​integrated with the study of comparative politics more generally. It is common to find analysis of not just environmental politics and policy as a topic on its own, but also integrated with disciplinary interests such as federalism (e.g., MacNeil and Paterson 2018; Stokes 2020), political parties (e.g., Linde 2018), populism (e.g., Lockwood 2018), business-​labor relations (Mildenberger 2020), varieties of capitalism (Wood et al. 2020), and major institutional features (see most of the citations in Roberts et al. 2018; Boasson 2019; Leinaweaver and Thomson 2016). In contrast, writing on the Global South often appears to have an artificial restriction of agenda. This is perhaps particularly clear in the region I have studied, Latin America. There have now been several decades of excellent academic writing on deforestation and a burgeoning literature on extractivism, the placement of megaprojects in rural and especially indigenous areas, and related topics (e.g., Dargent et al. 2017; Dunning 2008; Eisenstadt and Jones West 2017; Falleti and Riofrancos 2018; Fuentes-​George 2016; Gibson et al. 2000; Hochstetler and Tranjan 2016; Jaskoski 2014, 2020; Kashwan 2017; Steinberg 2001). Environmental movements, local communities, and international actors often play the largest roles in these studies. These are, of course, critical issues and actors for environmental outcomes in the region, but their dominance leaves many equally important topics uncovered. Looking at this literature, almost all focused on rural areas, one would not know that Latin America is one of the most urban regions of the world. The countries with the largest populations are heavily urban, including Argentina (92 percent), Brazil (87 percent), Colombia (81 percent), and Mexico (80 percent) (see data.worldbank.org) but topics particular to those population centers go largely unstudied (exceptions include Herrera 2017; Hochstetler and Keck 2007). In addition, turning to population centers might well direct more attention to political systems as a whole rather than to the subsets of them that handle extraction and deforestation. As noted earlier, partisan politics, more general state capacities like service provision, and the dynamics of federalism are just a few of the topics that are studied in the more developed countries that could receive more deserved attention with the shift in focus, to say nothing of urban environmental topics like pollution, transportation systems, sanitation systems, and the like. The Asian and African regions of the Global South are more diverse in their urban–​rural splits—​some are highly urbanized while others are mostly rural—​yet they would share with Latin America the observation that the studies of environmental politics there also focus on natural resources over pollution, deforestation over transport, and so on, with few connections to major comparative politics themes (exceptions include Death 2016; Gore this volume; Sowers 2013). There is, for example, a large literature on palm oil and deforestation in Malaysia and Indonesia, much of it on the private standards established for them (e.g., Hutabarat et al. 2019; Nesadurai 2019; Pacheco et al. 2020). Following long-​ standing attention to the role of oil and other natural resources that does not consider their

84   Kathryn Hochstetler environmental implications, there is now also growing attention to energy transitions (e.g., Behuria 2020; Kim and Thurbon 2015; Lewis 2013). Once again, the point is not to dismiss the importance of the topics that are now covered, but to invite larger numbers of people to engage with a larger number of topics. It is important to note that China is an important exception to these generalizations in that its environmental politics and policies are not only widely studied, but also studied much like those of the Global North, with fuller coverage of topics and better linkages to comparative politics themes (e.g., Eaton and Kostka 2014; Harrison and Kostka 2014; Lewis 2013; Liu et al. 2020; Stern 2013). Of course, it is one of the countries that most challenges the notion of a binary division between developing and developed countries, along with its fellow BRICS (BASIC plus Russia). Brazil and India also have comparatively well-​developed literatures on their environmental politics (e.g., Harrison and Kostka 2014; Hochstetler and Keck 2007; Hochstetler 2017). Yet a comparative environmental politics that includes ample study of just these most exceptional developing countries in addition to developed countries has not expanded the knowledge base much. The corollary is that there are still very few studies of the environmental politics of many developing countries at all, on any topic, except in quantitative studies of all the world’s countries. This is a broader problem of political science. A database of the citations to 27,690 works in 2,413 articles published in eight major political science journals found far disproportionate attention to North America and Western Europe, while articles on South Asia, sub-​Saharan Africa, and the Middle East and North Africa barely appeared (Wilson and Knutsen 2020). Small island states are crucially important in climate debates, to give a prominent example, but are overlooked with other small states in their domestic environmental and comparative politics (Veenendaal and Corbett 2015). Really redressing this issue will require the cooperation of not just authors, but also editors, reviewers, and dissertation supervisors who are notoriously dismissive of smaller, unfamiliar cases, questioning whether they deserve researcher attention and scarce journal and shelf space. It also requires finding much more space in academies and publication outlets for a much more diverse professoriate and research community, including scholars from these countries themselves. More flexible and creative doctoral training is another corollary. Beyond the restricted range of environmental topics and countries studied, much research on comparative environmental politics in developing countries has shown little attention to many of the standard topics of comparative politics. When writing about how Brazilian presidentialism and its particular form of partisan coalition-​building might affect its environmental politics for a special issue on presidentialism (Hochstetler 2017), for example, I found very few pieces that had made such connections. There are studies of individual presidents and their impacts on some environmental outcomes (e.g., Hindery 2013; Riofrancos 2020), but very little linking of those outcomes to presidentialism per se, despite the size of this institutional literature. Similarly, the effects of federalism or decentralization are often visible (e.g., in the studies of rural projects), but scholars rarely circle back to make their arguments ones about those topics themselves, even though this would help draw the attention of non–​environmental comparative politics scholars. Even the Journal of Environment and Development, normally focused on the developing world, included only US and European cases in a special issue on federalism (29, no. 1) (see also Selin and Vandeveer 2012).

Environment and Development    85 The lack of attention is not just one sided. Political science has seen important studies of service provision in developing countries that conclude it is a major governmental function with clear implications for democratic legitimacy (e.g., Golden and Min 2013; Kramon and Posner 2013; Lee 2018; Min 2015), but the environmental dimensions of the topic are often elided (Hochstetler 2021). Similarly, the large and well-​known literature on the “resource curse” (e.g., Ross 1999) tends to mention environmental impacts only in passing. To have a real field of comparative environmental politics will require both the comparativists and the scholars of the environment to reach toward each other. The increasingly evident effects of climate change—​which will transform much of national and international political economies and require serious rethinking of how and how not to develop—​are starting to draw the attention of the comparativists, but it would be helped by scholars of the environment turning to a broader range of comparative politics topics and issues, especially in developing countries.

What More and Better Developing Country Cases Would Give the Field More, and more diverse, studies of the environmental politics of developing countries would reverse several important limitations in the current field of comparative environmental politics (see also Wilson and Knutsen 2020). At a minimum, we need such studies to overcome the current inadequate description of the environmental politics of many countries in the world. Without them, we will have truncated and possibly distorted understandings of key political phenomena because we will know only how they appear in a few, almost certainly unrepresentative, countries. Furthermore, our ability to theorize and explain environmental and political phenomena, including in developed countries, will be limited without such studies. There is a much fuller and more varied world of environmental politics than we have documented in academic literature. The understudy of most of the world’s countries, most of which are developing countries, and the understudy of critical comparative politics topics in them means that we too often work with negative concepts once we move outside the advanced industrialized world. That is, the developing world is said to share certain lacks and gaps—​institutions are weak, resources are absent, actors are incipient—​but we still are learning what is actually there in all its diversity. The rare examples that aim to catalogue observations widely—​like a recent effort to characterize the climate politics of all of Latin America (Edwards and Roberts 2015)—​show huge and important variation in just one region. Often that variation may appear to follow some kind of continuum, suggesting one could find a cut point. But if one could find a binary dividing line between developed and developing countries on some environmental issue, a hard task in itself, it is unlikely that the line could be drawn equally cleanly in the same place on another dimension. The muddy empirical conclusions on whether there is an environmental Kuznets curve show this (Carson 2010). But another possibility is that we will need more and better qualitative categories

86   Kathryn Hochstetler to discuss what we find, and those might be only partially comprehensible in “developed versus developing terms.” Our current categories, most often drawn from only Northern cases, will often not be adequate for comprehending the true empirical variety and global patterns. This can be seen in recent discussions on how to bring a classic comparative politics concept like state capacity into the study of climate and environmental politics. In a study of state capacity in advanced industrial democracies, implementation capacity is treated as a given (Meckling and Nahm 2017, p. 743). Quantitative studies seem to concur, as seen when looking at bureaucratic maps to see if an institution exists (Hughes and Urpelainen 2015, p. 58). Even in one of the emerging powers, Brazil, however, those assumptions seem less warranted. A national environmental agency was created there in 1973, but it had just three people in two rooms and had very little real power until the 2000s (Hochstetler and Keck 2007, p. 27). Yet it actually achieved some important, if precarious, environmental governance in the 1970s and 1980s and afterward developed policies that led to really dramatic drops in annual deforestation rates—​for a while (Hochstetler 2021). More generally, bureaucracies that do not look like the Weberian ideal may govern with some effectiveness, especially embedded in networks that blur state and society and national and international divides (Death 2016, p. 52; Evans 1995; Harrison and Kostka 2014; Hochstetler and Keck 2007, pp. 223–​225; Sowers 2013). This returns us to ideas from the first generations of comparative politics scholars who understood that particular political functions might be performed in different ways across the globe (Almond and Coleman 1960). Through this lens, it would not be surprising that a state that is missing a specific version of capacity and definitely cannot be counted on to implement policy on its own might still be part of building effective environmental capacity. While the state capacity question is one where the conceptual baskets seem to line up with the developed–​developing binary divide, they do so only partially and there would almost certainly be more than two baskets. This would be even truer for other concepts. For example, there is global interest in the current generation of “populist” presidents who articulate a division between “the people” and elites and promote their vision of the former at the expense of the latter (Lockwood 2018). In climate politics as well as in the global coronavirus pandemic, they have attacked scientists and career bureaucrats, even deliberately dismantling the existing state capacity that was just discussed. The pandemic has spotlighted Donald Trump of the United States and Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro as very similar classic types of this right-​wing, anti-​science populism, with alarming implications for both climate and health policy in both countries, while the United Kingdom’s Boris Johnson and India’s Narendra Modi play slightly softer versions. These pairs obviously cross the development divide, and “developed” or “advanced” are not the first words one would think of to describe any of their responses, including the two countries otherwise often considered developed. The greater empirical variation may not be immediately welcomed by scholars of the developed world, where more delimited case choices allow for a great deal more to be taken for granted and greater depth of study. Yet standard works on case selection in comparative politics have cautioned that selecting cases in only one part of a fuller spectrum of outcomes and/​or causal factors may generate misleading conclusions, especially if the aim is to contribute to a general understanding of a phenomenon (Lieberman 2005).

Environment and Development    87 In addition, events show that scholars of the developed world might have been too quick to assume that the countries they study will vary within well-​specified boundaries. This is already true and probably will become even more so under the pressures of increasingly extreme climate change. This can have large implications for theoretical and conceptual frameworks, and a wider empirical base for theorizing will be essential. Established lines of scholarship in the Global North may well need to be reformulated as the field achieves more knowledge of the Global South and initiates more studies across the North–​South boundary. For example, the study of presidentialism considered the United States almost exclusively until the 1980s and had even settled into being a fairly anodyne review of individual presidencies. But after democracy returned in that decade to Latin America, the other major redoubt of presidentialism, the topic underwent real renewal, gaining much deeper insight into the tendencies and tensions of many presidential systems. Latin American scholars were central in this research (e.g., Pérez-​Liñan 2007; Rose-​Ackerman et al. 2011; Valenzuela 2004). With Donald Trump behaving very much like the “hyper-​presidents” of Latin America, that renewed literature with its wider empirical basis is generating strong guideposts to the possible dangers of democratic decay in the United States (Levitsky and Ziblatt 2018) that it could not have provided with only the historical American cases of presidentialism. In short, we impoverish our understanding of all the components of comparative environmental politics—​comparative, environmental, politics—​when we are too quick to narrow our sights to particular topics or a subset of states. An analytical binary division of the world’s countries into developed and developing ones makes that impoverishment more likely. And while I have mostly left aside the questions of international relations, it will be hard to comprehend countries’ positions in international negotiations without a much better understanding of what they really look like at home and the right conceptual frameworks for understanding that.

Environment and Development There is an obvious counterpoint to the argument here, which is that the two-​part division does capture the undeniable truth that some countries of the world have considerably more economic resources than others do. Those economic resources profoundly affect whether countries can build state capacity, train scientists, compensate losers in just transitions, and much more. The single most-​unified stance of the G-​77 is that its members need financial support if they are to undertake environmental action, especially if it relates to global environmental problems that they did not play a large role in creating (Najam 2005). Hints that this need might not be so binary have been emerging in the climate negotiations, however, where countries like China and Brazil have sometimes offered economic resources to other developing countries (Hochstetler 2012). A larger group of countries has agreed that resources should flow first to the least developed and most vulnerable countries, although there has been less agreement about who that might include (Kahn et al. 2020). I do not intend to argue here that there are no differences among the countries of the world, not least in development rights and resources.

88   Kathryn Hochstetler Yet that difference—​at least potentially a continuum of resource outcomes, if not a binary division—​is cross-​cut by a second dimension that is equally important for comparative environmental politics. The second dimension finds some countries, even comparatively poor ones, to have high environmental ambitions belied by their comparative economic status. Some of these are countries that face particularly strong and imminent threats from environmental change, like the small island developing states. But others have short and long periods when they simply begin to aim for higher environmental achievements. At least some of these show that environmental action may have more political costs than economic ones, as when Brazil brought deforestation under control from 2005 to 2012 even as its economy grew (Imazon 2013). Other countries may set out transformative goals in a part of their national economies, like wind power, even as they lack general environmental ambition (e.g., Lewis 2013). Perhaps needless to say, a number of quite wealthy countries also have environmental ambitions that greatly lag their resources as well, or have levels of environmental ambition that change over time (Mildenberger 2020; Stokes 2020). So, as opposed to the Stockholm-​and Rio-​era debates about whether environmental and developmental concerns could go together for a developing country, the perspective of this chapter suggests that there is a more compelling set of research questions about just when and why environmental ambition rises and falls. Economic resources evidently provide part of that story, but equally evidently not the whole. There may be an explanation in the growth of right-​wing populism or perhaps in the nature of some political institutions. Comparative politics offers an array of possible answers, and comparative environmental politics as a field deserves to have those investigated rather than assuming from the outset that one must first divide the cases into developed and developing countries.

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Chapter 5

National Cl i mat e Mitigation P ol i c y in Eu rope Paul Tobin and Louise Wylie Introduction Europe has dominated the field of comparative environmental politics research (see Wurzel et al. 2017, 2021). Europe, after all, should provide a useful laboratory for conducting such research: comparative environmental politics enable scholars to understand the patterns that exist between actors, identify new policy innovations and instances of best practice, and determine the importance of political context in shaping the art of the possible. As Steinberg and VanDeveer (2012, p. 9) note, “[c]‌omparative research, at its best, occupies this position between theoretical generalization and an appreciation for the importance of context.” As such, the many similarities within Europe should facilitate such comparison. Yet Europe is also a patchwork quilt of dissimilar nations. For instance, in 2016, Estonia’s per capita greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions were eight times greater than Albania’s (World Bank 2021a) while, in 2019, Luxembourg’s gross domestic product (GDP) per capita was 25 times that of Moldova (World Bank 2021b). The outcome of this diversity has been that while “Europe” dominates comparative environmental research, much of the academic focus—​particularly regarding climate “leadership”—​has been on a handful of Western European states. This focus merits scrutiny: West European emissions have been falling for decades, making the region less “important” during global negotiations in structural terms. Furthermore, while some European states claim to be leaders, many are not as ambitious as they suggest. If we focus on GHG emissions produced via consumption, rather than quantities produced within national boundaries, Europeans are responsible for importing vast quantities of high-​carbon goods (Davis and Caldeira 2010). Similarly, Norway—​which positions itself as a climate leader—​has created the world’s largest sovereign wealth fund through petroleum extraction. So why have studies that focus on Europe—​especially Western Europe—​ dominated this field?

94    Paul Tobin and Louise Wylie There is widespread agreement that Europe possesses a historical responsibility toward climate “mitigation” (the reduction of GHG emissions). As the originators of the Industrial Revolution, European states have produced large quantities of GHG emissions since the mid-​eighteenth century, which have lingered for years or even decades in the atmosphere. Thus, much of the literature, including this chapter, focuses on climate mitigation rather than “adaptation” (the reduction of vulnerability to climate change impacts). Indeed, the European Union’s (EU) target for the 2015 Paris climate conference did not even refer to climate adaptation (Tobin et al. 2018). Moreover, as several European states’ global reputations were shaped around their large militaries and colonialism, climate change provides countries with a means for cultivating a new, “cleaner” foreign policy persona (Lenschow and Sprungk 2010). As an additional benefit to action, early efforts toward climate mitigation by some states have aimed at creating new jobs and industries as well as lucrative export opportunities. This approach was particularly apparent during the late 1990s and early 2000s, within states that employed an “ecological modernization” stance, particularly the sextet of European environmental leaders: Austria, Denmark, Finland, Germany, the Netherlands, and Sweden (Andersen and Liefferink 1997). Building on this reputation for local environmental protection, many of the states identified as “pioneers” of climate action have been European. However, a “conglomerate of crises” (Falkner 2016) or “polycrisis” (Zeitlin et al. 2019)—​including the global financial, Eurozone, Syrian refugee, and Ukrainian annexation crises—​ dominated much of the 2010s, and were followed by the United Kingdom’s destabilizing “Brexit” decision and the COVID-​19 pandemic. This context is likely to shape the comparative environmental politics of European states in the years ahead. In addition, while comparing states’ environmental policies is important, let us not be blind to the importance of governance “above” and “below” these actors. For instance, since the early 2000s, the EU has been using climate action as a foundational “myth” to define its global identity—​with varying degrees of commitment (Lenschow and Sprungk 2010). In the 2010s, Luxembourgish Commission President (2014–​2019) Jean-​Claude Juncker mandated that 20 percent of the EU budget be spent on climate action. With such pioneering (albeit underperforming) climate initiatives as the EU Emissions Trading System (ETS; see Skjærseth and Wettestad 2009) that regulates 40 percent of member states’ total GHG emissions, one could argue that the supranational level is where many states take their lead on climate policy. Simultaneously, the steady shift toward an agenda that favors localism has seen policy-​makers and scholars alike move their attentions toward cities, businesses, and communities as sites for more bespoke climate experimentation, within a context favoring greater “polycentric” governance (Ostrom 2010; Jordan et al. 2018). Thus, to obtain a nuanced understanding of national policy in Europe, one must consider the multilevel governance (MLG) of climate change (Betsill and Bulkeley 2006). In this chapter, we hold a sense of caution regarding claims of European climate leadership and emphasize the need to avoid focusing exclusively on state-​level initiatives. Nonetheless, we argue that European states’ climate policies merit continued research. The state is the primary locus for internal governance, global diplomacy, and revenue collection (see Skocpol 1979), and therefore state structures are likely to provide the starting framework for much subsequent environmental action (Eckersley 2004). In Europe, despite the more supranational components of the EU, the Member States of the EU continue to exert significant influence on the EU’s international climate policy, which in turn, enjoys a reputation as

National Climate Mitigation Policy in Europe    95 a leader—​or at least, as a leader-​mediator or “leadiator” (Bäckstrand and Elgström 2013). Moreover, while local actors provide increasingly important opportunities for specialized climate efforts, it is the national level, particularly in unitary states but also in federal countries, that creates the frameworks into which substate initiatives fit (Duit 2014). As such, we explore, reflect upon, and encourage further research into the comparative study of state-​ level climate action in Europe. Despite their many differences, the states within Europe share, from a global perspective, many similarities across culture, politics, and economics that collectively facilitate the variables to be controlled, thus simplifying these states’ comparison. In this chapter, we first problematize the puzzle of conducting comparative climate policy analysis and identifying leaders and laggards. Second, we examine how crises can affect willingness to lead on climate change and render comparative analysis more challenging. Finally, we explore the importance of MLG, focusing on the EU “above” the state-​level and local actors “below” it. To put our argument simply, conducting comparative climate policy analysis is a complex business, but one thoroughly worth the effort.

Comparing National Climate Policies Conducting Comparative Studies Christoff and Eckersley (2011, p. 444) make the important point that “the quest to find a single cause, or even a common set of drivers, to explain climate leaders or climate laggards is a near-​futile exercise.” Still, there are merits to finding patterns that lie behind more ambitious climate action and, indeed, the factors that may inhibit such performance. For instance, EU accession led many newer Member States to assume stances that were more ambitious during the early to late 2000s. However, since then, Andonova and VanDeveer (2012) note a trend of “diverging convergence” in Central and Eastern European (CEE) states, whereby there is normative convergence around principles but divergence in domestic environmental institutions. As such, explanations of climate performance are often highly time-​and context-​specific. In seeking to compare complex and varied institutional arrangements, most studies are forced to focus on a subset of European countries or specific policy areas. Thus, while the first challenge in any comparative climate study is to ascertain the cases to be examined, both regarding comparability and also access to data, the next step involves the determination of the dependent variable. Which aspect and/​or indicator of climate action should a researcher focus on? Due to the complexity of climate mitigation, policy documents often end up being hundreds of pages in length. For instance, in 2019/​20, every EU member submitted a National Climate and Energy Plan of more than 100 pages in length; the Czech Republic’s is 439 pages long (European Commission 2021). Moreover, climate mitigation is increasingly integrated into other policy areas to avoid “siloing” activities (Dupont 2016). As such, making robust claims about the relative performances of two or more states is challenging. To conduct a robust analysis, we need to be precise about our dependent variable. One dividing line within the literature regards whether to focus on the outcomes of climate mitigation efforts—​that is, measuring reductions of GHGs—​or the outputs, by which we mean climate legislation. Lachapelle and Paterson (2013) cluster states according to

96    Paul Tobin and Louise Wylie their GHG emission trajectories, which enables comparison of outcomes. One difficulty in comparing outcomes, though, is that emissions can be reduced for reasons that are accidental or temporary. For instance, during the global financial crisis (GFC), emissions dropped around the world in line with reduced productivity. Finland had intended to meet its 2008–​2012 Kyoto Protocol target by building a new nuclear reactor (which, as of 2021, is incomplete and has tripled its budget), but instead met the goal because its economy shrank due to the GFC. Yet, despite these challenges in comparing outcomes, we may argue that emissions are the only factor that really matters in this context (Scruggs 1999) because sooner or later, global GHG emissions must start to come down. Otherwise, temperature increases will rapidly pass the 2°C threshold at which even more catastrophic scenarios occur, alongside positive feedback loops that accelerate still further warming. In conjunction with, and often instead of, focusing on outcomes, several methods have been employed to compare European states’ climate outputs. In an early study, Dolsak (2001) graded European countries on a cumulative 9-​point scale depending on the number of climate actions a state had taken, such as enacting carbon taxes. Subsequently, Huitema et al. (2011) categorized European states’ climate policies across 50 subcriteria regarding evaluations of their documentation rather than their “ambition.” Knill et al. (2012) created a 21-​point scale (across the environment more generally, including climate) and placed Germany at the top of their classification, while Poland was the lowest scoring EU Member State, at 23 out of 24. Tobin (2017) also created policy rankings by drawing from the annual expert survey-​based Climate Change Performance Index (CPPI; e.g., Germanwatch 2020). For 2006–​2012, Tobin (2017) places Germany, Ireland, Norway, Portugal, Sweden, and the UK joint-​top, with Austria the lowest scoring of the 18 wealthy European states included. In contrast, Bernauer and Böhmelt (2013) sought to improve on the widely used CPPI—​ whose country-​specific experts may differ in their understandings of policy performance—​ by merging outputs and outcomes to create a Climate Change Cooperation Index (C3-​I) featuring 172 countries. As a final illustrative example of research comparing climate policy outputs, Schaffrin et al. (2014) developed an Index of Policy Activity (IPA) to compare the “intensity” of climate and energy policy. The IPA measures intensity based on six equally weighted criteria: objectives, scope, integration, budget, monitoring, and implementation. While the IPA is labor intensive to employ because of its comprehensiveness, it has subsequently been employed both quantitatively and qualitatively, and for comparisons, in case studies and individual sectors alike (Burns et al. 2019). Thus, there have been numerous dependent variables in the comparative analysis of European climate policy due to both the diversity of cases within the continent and the complexity of comparing their performances, and this diversity is a virtue, not a failing, of the field. However, this specificity hinders comparisons across a large-​n quantity of states and/​or over longer time periods. As such, when the occasional policy innovation comes along that is specific, high-​profile, and employed in numerous states, scholars may have a useful new tool for comparison.

Recent National Climate Innovations During the 2010s, several innovative climate stances and declarations were formulated by European states that facilitate comparison between countries. First, in 2008, the UK’s

National Climate Mitigation Policy in Europe    97 Labour Government created the world’s first Climate Change Act, following a campaign by environmental nongovernmental organization (ENGO) Friends of the Earth (Carter and Childs 2018). This Climate Change Act functioned as a “Ulysses Pact” that sought to ensure continued action on climate change by requiring the country to meet a 5-​yearly “carbon budget” regardless of any short-​term crises or ideological opposition from future governments. This innovation sparked the diffusion of such Acts to other European states, including the five Nordic states, Ireland, and Austria, during the 2010s. However, while the UK’s Act was pioneering—​as it included, alongside the carbon budget, the creation of a Committee on Climate Change and an 80 percent GHG reduction target by 2050—​ Lockwood (2013) suggests that the Act does not fully “lock-​in” the state to future emissions. Furthermore, most of the subsequent Acts in other European states were not as comprehensive (Nash and Steurer 2019). Austria’s Act for example, is only four pages long compared to the United Kingdom’s 108 and only commits the state to a short-​term 2020 target. Thus, Climate Acts hold the potential to lock states into a more ambitious climate trajectory, and their differing components, targets, and timelines facilitate comparison between states. During 2019, ENGO campaigns resulted in Wales and Scotland declaring “climate emergencies,” closely followed by the United Kingdom, Ireland, and Portugal’s parliament in the subsequent weeks. These declarations sought to focus public opinion on the scale of the challenge posed by climate change and elevated the climate to the top of the agenda, mirrored by growing protests led by the Extinction Rebellion movement. By November 2019, the European Parliament had declared a climate emergency, thus pushing climate policy to the top of the agenda just as the European Commission’s next President, Ursula von der Leyen, commenced her 5-​year term. Simultaneous to the wave of climate emergencies, campaigners also encouraged states to commit to becoming “zero carbon” by a future date. If two countries have adopted very similar emissions reductions targets, such as becoming zero carbon, but aim to achieve these goals by different deadlines, then comparison across a medium-​or large-​n set becomes more achievable. As of December 2019, European states including Spain, Portugal, Italy, Germany, the United Kingdom, and the Nordic countries had pledged to achieve zero carbon status but by differing deadlines (WeForum 2019). Relatedly, Sweden included its pledge within its Climate Change Act, highlighting the links between different policy innovations. While the “climate emergency” and “zero carbon” campaigns were successful in their efforts to push climate change to the top of the agenda, their impact on emissions has yet to be researched. For researchers, then, the existence of such innovations as Climate Change Acts, coal phase-​out deadlines, and zero carbon targets facilitate comparison between states, as well as the identification of the actors, politics, and processes behind the creation of such stances. Nevertheless, where possible, additional, fine-​grained analyses that delve into the instruments or even settings of these instruments will provide the most precise means of comparison (e.g., Schaffrin et al. 2014) and can usefully complement investigations of more high-​profile innovations.

Leaders, Pioneers, and Laggards For states, the label of “leader” can provide a green veneer for a country’s international reputation. For researchers, the identification of pioneering activities within one country

98    Paul Tobin and Louise Wylie may provide a template for other states to replicate, thus facilitating more rapid climate mitigation. However, there are challenges when ascribing any form of “leadership” status. Much of the literature identifies climate leaders as primarily arising from Western Europe, but there are reasons to be skeptical of such claims. Let us critically reflect on the climate performances of three traditional environmental “leaders.” First, while Austria continued to be a pioneer regarding the protection of its beautiful landscapes throughout the 2010s, it did not match this approach through climate policy ambition (Tobin 2017). Thus, we should not assume a willingness to protect the local environment will imply the same commitment toward transboundary issues. Second, Germany has reduced its emissions dramatically since 1990, but the closure of inefficient East German industry following reunification meant that emissions plummeted for reasons unrelated to climate ambition (Schreurs and Tiberghien 2010). As a final example, scholars have repeatedly identified Sweden as a climate leader (Gronow et al. 2019). Yet, despite Sweden’s long-​standing leadership, its starting point was arguably the most straightforward in Europe as it already possessed a low-​carbon energy sector as well as few fossil fuel–​reliant jobs, a highly educated populace, and impressive levels of economic development. Favorable path dependence can play a major role in facilitating a state’s climate performance even decades later, which is not necessarily the same as showing climate leadership. Alongside skepticism of leadership claims from Western and Northern European states, CEE states often perform well despite their less favorable starting points. Undoubtedly, there are multiple environmental regionalisms comprising varying levels of ambition within Europe (Andonova and VanDeveer 2011). Yet, in contrast to long-​standing assumptions that European environmental leaders are based in Northern/​Western Europe, Knill et al. (2012), regarding environmental performance between 1970 and 2000, ranked Hungary fifth out of 24 economically developed states. Subsequently, in the early 2000s, VanDeveer and Carmin (2004, p. 315) argued that CEE states were “implementing dramatic environmental policy reforms as they gain EU membership,” with a transformation occurring in just the 10 or 15 years since the end of state socialism. Indeed, during the 2010s, Ćetković and Buzogány (2020) note substantial expansion of wind and solar energy in Bulgaria and Romania in particular. Many more examples exist of CEE states making major gains despite a more complicated and contested starting point for acting on climate change than in Western Europe. Admittedly, certain instances of high-​profile opposition to new climate legislation within the EU’s Council of Ministers have come from CEE states (Ćetković and Buzogány 2019). But this regional grouping is highly diverse and shows numerous instances of leadership. Thus, we should be cautious about labeling Northern/​Western European states “leaders” but CEE states “laggards” when their starting points for action are so different. The development of a shared understanding of what it means to be a leader is important then, if states are to be compared across time and from differing starting points. Wurzel et al. (2019) identify four manifestations of leadership and distinguish between climate pioneers and leaders by arguing that pioneers act ambitiously for internal reasons, while leaders seek followers. Of course, leadership can rise and fall over time, as evidenced by the Netherlands (Liefferink and Boezeman 2016), or be demonstrated in one sector but not in another, as in Norway (Boasson and Lahn 2017). Notably, Wurzel et al.’s (2017) conceptualization of climate leaders labels a state a “leader” only if its actions are positive toward climate action; there is currently limited conceptualization of how states may be leaders in encouraging others to obstruct or block action. For instance, while there is literature on climate

National Climate Mitigation Policy in Europe    99 laggards in Europe, such as, at certain times and in certain policy areas, Spain (Costa 2006) and Ireland (Torney and O’Gorman 2019), a “foot-​dragging” state is not the same as one that seeks to lead followers away from stronger climate targets. Coal-​dependent Poland, with a much lower GDP per capita compared to many West European EU members, is often touted as one of Europe’s least ambitious on climate change (Skjærseth 2018) and, alongside the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Slovakia, is a member of the Visegrád Group that often collaborate and are increasingly influential in the development of European climate policy (Braun 2019). Future investigations will benefit from conceptualizing leadership behaviors that seek to obstruct more rapid climate mitigation and identifying the coalitions, processes, and politics behind it.

Climate Policy During Crises Although many European states have committed to ambitious climate action, these pledges often assume a context of economic growth and rarely include the idea that future government capacity will be focused on a high-​profile crisis. The 2010s’ polycrisis has segued to a horrific global pandemic. This setting is particularly important, as many states, particularly within the EU, have committed to rapidly ratcheting up their climate policy ambition during the 2020s. This upward trajectory needs to be achieved, regardless of the context, if much greater future costs are to be avoided, and so new comparative analyses will benefit from building on existing studies of crises’ impacts on environmental protection.

The Global Financial Crisis The GFC, starting in 2008, was rapidly followed by the subsequent Eurozone crisis from 2010. While economic strife can affect many policy areas, environmental protection requires significant upfront investment, even if much or all of it is recouped later. As such, in their toolkit for measuring the impact of the crisis on European environmental policy, in addition to “outcomes” and “outputs,” Burns and Tobin (2016) add “means,” which are the budgets allocated toward environmental action. Following the 2008–​2009 GFC, some argued that one path out of the crisis would be green stimulus packages that sought to grow out of the crisis via investment in green industries, while others pushed for austerity, despite the limitations of the academic basis for doing so (see Herndon et al. 2014). The outcome, then, is a challenging new research puzzle: If climate change has fallen down the political agenda due to concerns over joblessness, there are fewer resources to act, and we cannot be certain how states would have acted otherwise, how can we compare states’ performances? Answering these questions is important as economic slumps are an inevitable facet of capitalist economies, meaning that climate action needs to be resilient to these peaks and troughs if it is to be effective over the medium to long term. Research on the impacts of the global financial and Eurozone crises on climate policy has largely focused on the EU (e.g., Burns and Tobin 2020; Gravey and Moore 2019; Skovgaard 2014; Slominski 2016). Overall, it appears that, during the 2010s, levels of policy ambition were broadly resilient and plateaued or even increased slightly but did not increase at the

100    Paul Tobin and Louise Wylie rate needed to mitigate environmental degradation sufficiently. At the state level, Skovgaard et al. (2019) found no sign of lower ambitions in Sweden following the GFC (although the state’s economy was not as badly affected as elsewhere), while Denmark demonstrated commitments to climate action across left-​and right-​wing parties, thus mirroring existing assumptions around Scandinavian states and climate policy. Fernandez (2019) identified a general pattern of stasis in Spain, but this followed a period of investment in renewables prior to the crisis. Davidescu (2019) notes that Romania demonstrated increases in ambition early on following the crisis, followed by the dismantling of climate legislation (for more on dismantling, see next section). Finally, Andreas (2019) found that the United Kingdom cut entire renewables programs, despite its austerity agenda not being required by any external bailout conditions. Thus, more research is still needed to understand why European countries respond differently to the challenges of economic threats and what are the implications of these different paths. Yet the impacts of the crisis extend beyond the direct reductions in environmental spending. Regardless of whether the rise in populism throughout the 2010s was causally linked to the impacts of the crisis, many European populist parties that drew greater media attention during the decade were skeptical about climate action. In the United Kingdom, the UK Independence Party pledged to repeal the pioneering 2008 Climate Change Act, and in Germany, Alternative für Deutschland took a similar stance during the 2017 elections (Andreas 2019). While environmental protection has become somewhat of a valence issue within Europe following decades of growing popular support for green parties and policies, this status cannot be guaranteed if Europe struggles to weather future crises.

Policy Resilience During Future Crises Many states outside Europe pursue environmental policy in a context of ongoing instability, weak institutions, and destructive natural disasters. Steinberg (2012) labels such contexts “stochastic political systems” because of their changeable natures. For much of the existing literature on comparative environmental politics in Europe, which primarily focuses on Western European countries, the cases were stable, wealthy, and democratic regimes. Indeed, modern Weberian bureaucracies are premised around the provision of long-​term public goods and inherently rely on stability (O’Toole and Meier 2003). Yet the tumultuous European context may mean that scholars wish to learn from research on policy-​making within unstable regimes. As Steinberg (2012, pp. 261–​262) notes, “[t]‌he challenge that pervasive social disruptions pose for the consolidation of policy reforms has been missed by researchers comparing the policy responsiveness of industrialized democracies.” The major economic crises of the 2010s saw several states receiving large bail-​outs and were followed by the decision of the United Kingdom to leave the European Union, as well as concerns over European electoral legitimacy, most starkly in Belarus in summer 2020. These events are now being succeeded by the extreme tragedy of a global pandemic. Indeed, the 2020 conference of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC)—​ co-​hosted by European nations Italy and the United Kingdom—​was postponed due to the pandemic. That conference was due to set the next 5-​year agenda; falling behind schedule was a major loss. Thus, sadly, studies of comparative environmental politics that focus on how states respond to crises are likely to be necessary throughout the 2020s.

National Climate Mitigation Policy in Europe    101 As discussed, one path for mitigating the impact of future crises could be self-​binding legislation, such as the United Kingdom’s Climate Change Act, which ensures action continues despite countervailing forces. However, the United Kingdom was forecast to struggle to meet these obligations due to a separate crisis, its turbulent withdrawal from the European Union (Farstad et al. 2018). While the fight against climate change was labeled an “essential element” of the EU-​UK post-​Brexit trade deal, policies will need to be monitored and updated over time to avoid regression of standards “by default” (Jordan et al. 2020). Indeed, in crisis contexts, scholars may find it pertinent to explore the concept of policy dismantling, which is the “cutting, diminution or removal of existing policy” (Jordan et al. 2013, p. 795), of which Bauer and Knill (2012) identify four ideal types. These ideal types are determined by whether dismantling is high-​or low-​visibility and whether it follows a deliberate dismantling decision or not. Deliberate dismantling that occurs in a low-​visibility manner (“dismantling by arena shifting”) is particularly insidious and may be favored by policy-​makers wishing to avoid opprobrium for weakening a popular policy area. Such behavior may become apparent when viewed from a multilevel perspective: states may allocate greater responsibilities to the local level under the guise of “devolution,” only to cut finances allocated to local government at the same time (Eckersley and Tobin 2019).

The Importance of Multilevel Governance While this chapter explores comparative national climate policy in Europe, “it is only by taking a multilevel perspective that we can fully capture the social, political, and economic processes that shape global environmental governance” (Betsill and Bulkeley 2006, p. 141). For example, at the Paris UNFCCC conference in 2015, the EU states submitted a shared target (joined by neighboring Norway and Switzerland) of 40 percent emissions reductions based on 1990 levels by 2030, although individual EU Member States vary markedly in their commitments (see Tobin et al. 2018). Within the European Union, the Commission plays a key role in orchestrating climate governance within Member States as the sole proposer of EU legislation. Looking more in-​depth, Burns and Tobin (2020) find that the Commission’s behind-​the-​scenes technical instruments were used more frequently during the 2010s, raising questions around transparency and accountability of policy-​making within EU governance. Thus, EU climate policy merits extensive study because of its impact on EU states, as well as its own role in the world as an actor. Yet let us not homogenize all EU Member States’ climate policies because of their shared membership of the influential body. Member States play a role in shaping EU climate policy (Oberthür and Dupont 2017), and there continues to be stark variation in the stances taken in doing so. Moreover, we are seeing the creation of a multispeed Europe, whereby countries are part of regional and/​or ideological subgroupings that favor increased or reduced integration in given policy areas. In this context, continuing to explore variations at the Member State level will be increasingly important. In addition to the supranational level, incorporating the substate is essential to understanding European states’ climate policies. The majority of European states are unitary rather than federal in their governance models, which facilitates comparison between them. Although most European countries have demonstrated some form of localization over recent

102    Paul Tobin and Louise Wylie decades, there is still distinct variation between their approaches and the amount of policy-​ making power allocated to substate actors. Bulgaria, Greece, Ireland, Malta, and Romania are highly centralized unitary states, whereas Lithuania, the Netherlands, and Slovenia are less so, and the Scandinavian states have allocated a wide range of responsibilities for regional development, including aspects of climate policy, to local governments. The only federal European states are Austria, Germany, Switzerland, Belgium, and Bosnia-​Herzegovina, with the former three considered more developed in their devolution approaches than the latter two (Pallaver and Karlhofer 2017, p. 293). In Germany, the 16 constitutive Länder are major actors in the country’s governance: they each have their own constitutions, executives, and legislatures; they constitute the Bundesrat as the second chamber of parliament; and, crucially, they implement national legislation. As such, the Länder play an important legislative role at the national level, and, indeed, an awareness of MLG is foundational for any analysis seeking to compare and explain one European state’s climate policy with another. Within the United Kingdom, Italy, and Spain, the regional and substate national governments have additional powers to those in other unitary countries. Unlike federal European states, states containing devolved nations or regions can have distinctly asymmetrical policy-​making competences. The United Kingdom stands as a prime example of the ways in which devolved nations’—​in this case, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland—​ climate policies interact with the state-​level policies. England makes up around 85 percent of the United Kingdom’s population and has no England-​wide devolved powers. As such, England’s national climate policies are established by the UK government. On the other hand, the Scottish Parliament, Welsh Parliament, and Northern Ireland Assembly possess devolved powers to produce policy on climate change and, as such, have different targets. For example, the UK government aims to reach net zero GHG emissions by 2050, whereas the Scottish Parliament aims for carbon neutrality by 2045. While the Scottish Parliament and Welsh Parliament have produced climate policies specific to their substate nation, the Northern Irish Assembly has not, despite declaring a climate emergency in January 2020. Due to the unique nature of Northern Ireland’s political history, both unionists and nationalists must join together in a power-​sharing executive in order for the Assembly to stand, a stipulation which neither the United Kingdom as a whole, Scotland, nor Wales share. Notably, the Assembly was in a period of suspension from July 2017 until January 2020. In addition, the number of devolved competences and the constitutional arrangement of such European states as the United Kingdom, Spain, and Italy have not been static over time, thus complicating comparison of climate policy still further. The impact of unitary, federal, or devolved governance models on national climate policy ambition merits much further investigation. On the one hand, Brown (2012) suggests that, in federal systems, we may expect a degree of competition between constituent states regarding their climate policies that could elevate overall ambition levels. Yet, in contrast to the subnational climate leadership shown in the United States (see David Vogel’s chapter on California’s Environmental Policy Leadership, this volume), evidence in Europe to date is less favorable (regarding climate mitigation, rather than adaptation; see Steurer and Clar 2015 on Austria; Selin and VanDeveer 2012). In Switzerland, emissions reductions in the building sector were found by Casado-​Asensio and Steurer (2016, p. 257) to have occurred “despite, not because of Swiss federalism” due to the establishment of lowest common denominator policies that were difficult to strengthen over time. Similarly, the need for

National Climate Mitigation Policy in Europe    103 ministers from differing parties and across different levels to find compromises has been found to hinder ambition in Belgium (Happaerts et al. 2012). In sum, without an awareness of the differing governance models operating across multiple levels, detailed research into the comparative environmental politics of European states is impossible.

Conclusion Much ink has been spilled in trying to compare the climate politics of European states. We argue that there is much merit in continuing to do so, notwithstanding the many complexities of conducting such research. It can be tempting to focus climate politics research on “leading” Western European countries or only on state-​level governance. Instead, this chapter has argued in favor of embracing complexity in comparing beyond the usual suspects, with an awareness of crisis conditions and across multiple governance points. As we face the next decade, we touch on four avenues for future research out of many. First, there is great analytic value in examining European countries’ trajectories over time, rather than their positions at the time of investigation, particularly regarding CEE states that have sought to address climate change from difficult starting points. Second, on leadership, we suggest that greater attention be paid to those states that rally others to obstruct greater ambition. Which actors, coalitions, processes, and tactics are used to stymy sharper climate mitigation trajectories? Third, there are numerous crises that dictate how, when, and why states act on climate change, such as the ongoing economic crises that emphasize the importance of bringing political economy into comparative studies. But what of those long-​standing, simmering crises that have been allowed to continue under the surface? Women withstand the worst impacts of climate change, but politically are in a more marginalized position to act on this reality. Indeed, there are numerous overlaps between the needs to secure gender equality and climate justice, with more studies needed to explore how these goals may be married (see Magnusdottir and Kronsell 2015). Likewise, the Black Lives Matter protests highlight ongoing injustices that mirror the neocolonial patterns of carbon leakage, which many European states depend on while claiming positions of leadership. Finally, we argue that the primacy of the state within climate governance cannot be at the price of an awareness of multiple levels and non-​state actors. As we shift our attention away from hierarchical understandings of power, research may be usefully directed toward networks of climate governance, comprising overlapping businesses, NGOs, and individuals. The identification of each relevant stakeholder in a model as complex as a state’s climate policy is particularly difficult, but computer software is increasingly ready for the challenge. Moreover, network analyses will benefit greater research into how the concept of time may be included (Kim 2019), as changing affiliations and stances are especially important when seeking to understand climate policy. In sum, national governments, in Western Europe in particular, are rightly no longer the only game in town when it comes to comparative climate politics research. They are, however, important nodes within a growing network, and these merit continued detailed exploration as we race to increase our ambitions against the ticking clock of climate change. There is no time to lose.

104    Paul Tobin and Louise Wylie

Acknowledgments The support of the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) is gratefully acknowledged, having funded Paul Tobin via grant ES/​S014500/​1 during the writing of this chapter.

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Chapter 6

Gov erning Fl o od a nd Cl im ate Risks i n t h e Netherl and s a nd Hu nga ry A Comparative Analysis

Elizabeth A. Albright From the development of canals in the Netherlands in the seventeenth century, to the drainage of water from the plains of eastern Hungary in the 1800s, humans have tried to tame and control the flow of water across the European continent. Across the landscapes, humans have engineered structures to direct and divert water to protect lives and livelihoods from flood damages. But these physical structures have repeatedly failed, replaced by increasingly complex systems built to stem the overflow of water in times of floods. As carbon and other greenhouse gases accumulate in the atmosphere and patterns of precipitation become more extreme, there is increasing concern about whether systems of the past—​both infrastructure and governance—​will be adequate for a changing future. Extreme flood events have occurred since the presence of human settlements on the continent, including an extreme flood in 549 bce in present-​day Italy and the St. Lucia flood in 1287, which killed tens of thousands. Many other large-​scale floods caused mass devastation between the thirteenth and twentieth centuries, including two of the most damaging floods in Hungarian history in 1838 and 1878. More recently, in the late twentieth and early twenty-​ first centuries, several nations of the European Union experienced devastating floods that wrought severe damage to life, property, and natural systems (Jongman et al. 2014). From 1998 to 2009, more than 200 major flood events were recorded, leading to more than 1,000 deaths, with damages to public and private property exceeding €50 billion (European Commission 2020a). Types of flooding vary across the European continent, including fluvial (overflowing of river banks) and pluvial flooding (caused by extreme rainfall), flash flooding, floods driven by snow melt, and coastal flooding (Driessen et al. 2016), with each type of flooding presenting its own challenges to its management. This chapter examines the histories of governance of flood risks in a changing climate across two EU Member States: the Netherlands and Hungary. While each nation has faced

110   Elizabeth A. Albright centuries of devastating flooding, each has its distinct history of governance systems, both broadly and specifically related to flood and climate risks. The Netherlands, a relatively wealthy, original Member State of the European Economic Community (EEC) and the European Union has a longer history of democratic practices compared to Hungary. Hungary, a financially poorer nation, acceded to the EU in 2004, after decades of communist rule as a part of the Warsaw Pact. As such, Hungary has a shorter recent history of decentralized environmental governance, less experience in civic engagement in governmental decision-​making, and a less robust formally recognized civil society (Vari 2002; Carmin and VanDeveer 2004). Despite these differences, both states and societies are currently members of the European Union and must grapple with implementing EU directives and strategies to (ideally) help mitigate flood and climate risks that place their residents and land in danger of damage and destruction. This cross-​national comparison leverages differences in the governance of flood risks in these two nations to explore what encourages adaptation and resilience to climate-​driven risks. More specifically, this chapter compares (1) the extent of integration (or fragmentation) of flood risk governance and (2) civil society involvement in flood and climate risk management in Hungary and the Netherlands over time to provide insights into potential drivers of (or barriers to) societal resilience to climate-​driven risks. In doing so, this chapter focuses on flood risk management, the costliest of climate-​driven disasters that the European continent faces (Van Renssen 2013).

Integration and Fragmentation of Governance Systems Governments and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) are increasingly called upon to manage climate-​related risks such as floods and respond to and recover from climate-​ related disasters (Crow and Albright 2019; also see Alcañiz and Sanchez-​Rivera, in this volume). Governance of risks includes “the complex web of actors, rules, conventions, processes and mechanisms” that seek to mitigate and manage risks (Renn 2008, p. 9). Governance arrangements for flood risk management have been defined as “institutional constellations resulting from an interplay between actors and actor coalitions involved in all policy domains relevant for flood risk management—​including water management, spatial planning and disaster management; their dominant discourses; formal and informal rules of the game; and the power and resource base of the actors involved” (Hegger et al. 2014, p. 4131, in Wiering et al. 2017). Governance of climate risks may be more effective with coordination across economic and social sectors, as well as with integration across and coordination among global, national, and subnational government and nongovernment organizations. Effective climate adaptation often requires national-​ level governmental organizations such as ministries and agencies to coordinate across multiple sectors (e.g., transportation, agriculture, and emergency response). Governance systems that can effectively span sectoral and vertical boundaries, adapt to and learn from climate-​related disasters, and leverage local knowledge and capacities are needed to build resilience (Crow and Albright 2019).

Governing Flood and Climate Risks    111 Management of climate and flood risks by governance systems may be integrated across policy domains and sectors or, alternatively, may be fragmented or siloed within domains. The degree and type of fragmentation may influence the effectiveness of flood risk mitigation (Gilissen et al. 2016). Gilissen et al. (2016) outlined four distinct types of fragmentation that may occur in flood risk governance that depend on whether actors work in the same (or different) policy domains and are pursuing the same (or different) flood risk management strategies. And, depending on the type of fragmentation, difficulties may arise, including barriers in accessing information and policies that conflict or don’t align (Gilissen et al. 2016).

Civil Society Engagement in Flood Risk Governance The Aarhus Convention (Aarhus), more formally named the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe on Access to Information, Public Participation in Decision-​making and Access to Justice in Environmental Matters, entered into force in 2001 and was ratified by the European Union and its Member States soon thereafter. Aarhus calls for increased public participation in environmental decision-​making, greater transparency and access to information, and access to justice in situations in which environmental laws are violated (Aarhus 1998). Some environmental directives align with the public participation mandates of Aarhus, such as the EU Water Framework Directive (EUWFD) that mandates public participation in the development of river basin management planning. Although there are increasing calls for public and civic engagement in environmental decision-​making, the structures and processes can vary widely. These engagement processes can vary across multiple factors, including type of participant (e.g., expert, public, governmental, and nongovernmental), intensity and structure of participation (e.g., public hearings, advisory or consultancy, consensus-​based processes), and who leads the process (Beierle 2002; Rowe and Frewer 2000; Hansen and Maenpaa 2008). Sabatier et al. (2005) and others have argued that those who are affected or who could be affected by a decision should participate in a process in which their views are heard. Korfmacher (1998, 2001) and others suggest that the timing of participation is also key: the public and other participants should engage early and throughout the length of the decision-​making process.

Effective Flood Risk Governance: Learning and Resilience Scholars have developed multiple frameworks to analyze the effectiveness of climate and flood risk governance (Alexander et al. 2016; Pahl-​Wostl et al. 2013; Hegger et al. 2014). The evaluation benchmarks or metrics vary across frameworks but often focus broadly on societal resilience—​the ability to reduce risks, such as flooding, along with the capacity to learn from, adapt to, and change in response to of climate-​driven disasters (Alexander et al.

112   Elizabeth A. Albright 2016). The concept of resilience centers on the development or strengthening of adaptive capacity, which often includes adapting, learning, and transforming structures, processes, and policies in response to new information and experiences (Adger 2003, Termeer et al. 2011, Pahl-​Wostl et al. 2013). Variation in fragmentation and public engagement across the two nations will be examined as potential drivers of societal resilience to climate-​driven risks. As noted earlier, extreme flooding is the costliest of climate-​driven disasters that the European continent faces. To attempt to mitigate the risks of flooding, the European Union, as well several Member States, has altered flood risk management policies and strategies in response to disastrous flooding, including shifting governance systems, approaches, and belief systems about the management of flood risks (Johnson and Priest 2008; Albright 2011). The following section provides an overview of the recent history of flood management by the European Union, outlining an evolution from management with a singular focus on floods, to a broader, more integrated approach to climate risk governance. This overview provides context for a comparative analysis of state-​level cases in the Netherlands and Hungary, current EU Member States that have experienced multiple, extensive, and extremely damaging flood events over centuries. Comparing the trajectories of the two nations and the extent to which they have adopted and changed flood-​related policies and governance approaches over time should lend insight into the drivers of and barriers to greater societal resilience to climate risks. These cases are based on and informed by interviews conducted with national and local governmental and nongovernmental organizations in Hungary from 2005 to 2007 (Albright 2009), as well as by an analysis of primary and secondary documents and literature focused on both national cases.

Management of Climate Risks by the European Union Despite several large and deadly floods in the twentieth century, the European Union had not adopted an integrated flood or climate risk management strategy prior to the turn of the twenty-​first century, in part due to national hesitation to grant the Union competence in this policy realm (Remling 2018; also see Selin and VanDeveer 2015; Tobin and Wylie, in this volume). Following a series of extreme flood events in the 1990s and early 2000s, including the catastrophic floods in Central Europe in 2002, the European Commission proposed a flood directive in 2006, which was adopted as the EU Flood Directive (EUFD) in 2007. This directive focuses on flood risk assessment, mitigation, prevention, and recovery, mandating that Member States transpose broad EU requirements into their national laws (Johnson and Priest 2008). The EUFD requires that all Member States must assess flood risks within their territory, develop flood risk maps, and establish flood risk management plans (European Commission 2021). The EUFD is a “daughter” framework to the EUWFD, which entered into force in late 2000. The EUWFD requires all Member States to develop river basin management plans to meet a set of objectives for that river basin, including quantitative (e.g., quantity of groundwater), ecological, and chemical status of water bodies (European Commission 2020b). Article 14 of the EUWFD mandates public participation through information sharing and consultation, with active participation in river basin management

Governing Flood and Climate Risks    113 planning encouraged. With the adoption of the EUFD, Member States were required to coordinate flood risk management within the framework of river basin planning. Since the adoption of the EUFD, approaches to flood risk management and, more broadly, climate risk governance, continue to evolve in the European Union, with shifts in roles and responsibilities in mitigating and recovering from climate-​driven disasters. These shifts in thinking led to the adoption of a green paper titled “Adapting to Climate Change in Europe” (European Commission 2018), which then evolved in 2009 into a white paper, “Adapting to Climate Change: Towards a European Framework for Action” (European Environment Agency 2009), which further integrated climate adaptation strategies with other policy domains (Lioubimtseva and da Cunha 2020). The white paper (2009) put forth an economic case for adopting climate adaptation strategies and stated that most action will occur at local, regional, and national levels, but that the European Union should support and strengthen these actions for a more integrated approach to adaptation across member nations (European Commission 2009). In 2013, the European Commission expanded on the green and white papers by adopting a climate adaptation strategy for the European Union (European Commission 2013), with an evaluation of this strategy in 2018 (European Commission 2018). The 2013 strategy emphasized the need to fill gaps in knowledge around adaptation to improve decision-​ making across policy realms (Remling 2018). The EU climate adaptation strategy focuses on integrating climate adaptation across policy domains (i.e., mainstreaming). Scholars have critiqued the European Union’s approach to climate adaptation for its focus on improving scientific or technical knowledge, which may elevate more top-​down, technocratic, and market-​based approaches to the management of climate risks while limiting potential for transformative change of systems and structures that lead to climate exposure and vulnerability (Schulz and Siriwardane 2015; Remling 2018). In short, the occurrence of a series of devasting floods at the start of the twentieth century prompted the European Commission to advance flood-​specific policies of risk assessment and risk management planning. In the decade that followed, the discourse and strategies around managing these risks have broadened and shifted focus to include climate-​related risks and adaptation. Given this context of an evolution of climate risk–​related policies and thinking in the European Union, the following section outlines the trajectories of flood and climate risk governance in the Netherlands and Hungary. Whereas these two nations have both experienced lengthy histories of devastating flooding and have responded with centuries of engineered approaches to control the flow of waters, they have unique histories of governance systems to manage floods. Experiences and practices of engaging civil society in government decision-​making also differ across the two nations. To help identify potential drivers of and/​or barriers to flood and climate resilience, the cases will be compared through the frames of integration (or fragmentation) of these governance systems and civil society engagement.

Climate and Flood Risk Management in the Netherlands The Netherlands, a nation of approximately 17 million citizens, entered into the European Economic Community (EEC) in 1957 (Treaty of Rome) and the European Union in 1992

114   Elizabeth A. Albright (Treaty of Maastricht). The country consists of 12 regional provinces and 388 municipalities (European Union 2020). The land area of the nation encompasses the delta of three major European rivers: the Rhine, Meuse, and Scheldt (Orr et al. 2007). A low-​lying nation with more than 1,000 kilometers of coastline along the North Sea, the Netherlands has been at risk of flooding since its inception. Approximately a quarter of the landmass of the nation sits below sea level (Pilarczyk 2006). From the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, lakes in the country were drained and reclaimed for agricultural production (Hoeksema 2007). In the twentieth century, a tidal estuary was converted into land for agricultural and urban uses, forming a new province (Flevoland) that added 5 percent to the country’s total land area (Hoeksema 2007). Because of its geography, the Netherlands has an extended history of managing floods and flood risks (Mostert 2006; Verkerk and Van Buuren 2013). Water boards, also called regional water authorities, have a centuries-​long history in managing water resources in the Netherlands (Kuks 2004). Initially formed in the thirteenth century, the democratically elected water boards were responsible for managing water levels and dike and levee systems. Initially decentralized, the boards consisted of elected representatives from local communities with minimal centralized coordination among boards (Kuks 2004). Throughout its history of devasting floods, including the Christmas Flood of 1717 which killed more than 14,000 residents, the Netherlands has developed a complex system of dikes and dams. The highly engineered system currently includes more than 3,000 kilometers of hardened infrastructure to protect lives and property from damaging floods (Pilarczyk 2006). The development and management of the flood protection system has evolved over centuries. Up until the eighteenth century, communities were responsible for the management of their own flood protection systems. An increasing need for coordination among water boards, in part due to land subsidence, led to greater centralization of water resource management. The centuries-​old decentralized system of flood management became more centralized with the formation of the Rijkswaterstaat in 1798, a technocratic national authority with the responsibility of managing the flood protection systems across the whole nation (Pahl-​Wostl et al. 2013; Orr et al. 2007; Kuks 2004). It was during this time in the early nineteenth century that the Netherlands became an independent monarchy (1815) and a new constitution was formed (Kuks 2004). In 1953, less than a decade after the end of the World War II, a disastrous flood killed more than 1,800 Dutch residents, destroyed more than 100,000 homes, and inundated more than 200,000 hectares of land (Tetelepta n.d.; Orr et al. 2007). Prior to this disaster, many residents as well as flood managers had placed their trust in the national authority (the Rijkswaterstaat) to prevent such a catastrophe. Many believed they were underprepared and not adequately warned about the looming devastation (Orr et al. 2007). This flood and the damages it caused motivated the national government of the Netherlands to reinvest in and strengthen its flood management system. The Delta Project, developed in the flood’s aftermath, reflected shifting societal views on the management of flood waters and attempted to address the vulnerabilities of society to these floods (Orr et al. 2007). The Delta Project included the development of a storm surge barrier and a new shipping route connecting the city of Rotterdam with the North Sea (Orr et al. 2007). Along with these structural alterations, the Rijkswaterstaat developed a set of standards for flood defense systems and a funding mechanism with shared responsibility between its national and regional authorities (Van Buuren et al. 2014). The decentralized local water boards continued to manage local water systems, including water quantity and quality (Restemeyer et al. 2017;

Governing Flood and Climate Risks    115 Kamperman and Biesbroek 2017). Even with these structural and financial changes, the overarching approach to flood management in the Netherlands remained focused on physical infrastructure and engineered flood protection systems.

A Shift in Approaches: “Room for the River” During the 1990s, tensions became more evident between two approaches to flood risk management: the historical approach that relied heavily on flood protection systems made of physical infrastructure, and a more comprehensive approach that included risk mitigation, land use planning, and disaster management, along with the development and maintenance of physical infrastructure (Van Buuren et al. 2016; Orr et al. 2007). Multiple flood risk studies were conducted in the early 2000s, in part motivated by the infrastructure failures wrought by Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, in the United States. These Dutch studies included risk-​ mapping exercises across the nation. During this period, multiple major floods across Europe occurred, resulting in the development of the EUFD, discussed earlier (Van Buuren et al. 2016). Motivated by the confluence of these events, the Dutch National Water Plan 2009–​ 2015 (Rijkswaterstaat 2009) introduced a novel approach to flood management. This new approach sought to encourage learning from and adapting to flood experiences and new information, and it placed a greater emphasis on land use planning, public participation, and climate-​proofing. An emphasis on spatial planning, integration of climate-​change scenarios, and involvement of civil society in flood management signified a substantive departure from the previous infrastructure-​centric flood management regime. In more than 30 places across the Netherlands, changes were made to give increased space for the rivers to flow in times of abundant flow (Dutch Water Sector 2019).

National Flood and Climate Adaptation Strategies Along with the 2009 changes in flood management, the Netherlands had transposed and implemented both the EUWFD (2020b) and the EUFD (2020a), with high levels of integration between water and flood management and among national and subnational levels, and with competencies for flooding of major rivers and water bodies located in the Ministry of Transport, Public Works, and Water Management (Priest et al. 2016; Dieperink et al. 2012). In 2010, this Ministry was restructured as the Ministry of Infrastructure and Environment, and then was reorganized to Ministry of Infrastructure and Water Management in 2017 (Priest et al. 2016; Dieperink et al. 2012). The regional water boards maintain the flood infrastructure and quality and quantity of regional waters and are responsible for regional implementation of the EUWFD. The Ministry of Infrastructure and Water Management is responsible for EUFD implementation and tasked with reporting progress to the European Commission (Stowa 2021). At the local level, water boards, provinces, municipalities, and safety regions are all involved in providing flood-​related information and regional (provincial) coordination. Along with these changes in water management, the Netherlands developed its first national climate adaptation strategy in 2007, “Make Space for Climate” (Maak ruimte voor klimaat!), that involved the Ministry of Transport, Public Works and Water Management and the Ministry of Housing, Spatial Planning and Environment (Biesbroek et al. 2010).

116   Elizabeth A. Albright Unsurprisingly, the Dutch national strategy prioritized water resource management and spatial planning but also integrated other sectors such as agriculture, forests, biodiversity, and finance into this strategy (Biesbroek et al. 2010). During this initial development of a national strategy, the Netherlands faced the challenge of integrating climate adaptation policy and spatial planning (de Bruin et al. 2009). In their 2010 analysis of adaptation and extreme climatic events across four European river basins, Huntjens et al. (2011) scored the actions in the Rivierenland river basin in the Netherlands the highest across multiple measures, including awareness raising, policy development, implementation, and risk management. In 2016, the Netherlands furthered its work on climate risk mitigation by developing its second national adaptation strategy (NAS), “Adapting with Ambition” (European Commission 2018). Three national workshops were held to incorporate stakeholder participation in the strategy development process (European Commission 2018). According to the European Commission participation scorecard, multiple stakeholders participated in this process, although they were heavily drawn from national and subnational government authorities.1 As policies such as the Aarhus Convention and the EUWFD call for increased civil society engagement, authentic public and nongovernmental participation in the development of national climate mitigation is lacking in both breadth and depth.

Subnational Climate Risk Governance in the Netherlands In addition to the national actions of the Delta Program and the NASs, as of 2009, all provinces within the Netherlands agreed to mainstream climate adaptation policies in their spatial planning by 2015 (European Commission 2018). By 2018, all but 2 of the 12 provinces have assessed vulnerabilities to climate change in their area, and roughly half of municipalities in the Netherlands have adopted adaptation plans. The Water Act (2009) mandates that water boards create a water management plan. Whereas it is clear that climate change adaptation initiatives are increasing in numbers over time in these plans, there has been uneveness in climate adaptation across regional water boards in the Netherlands (Kamperman and Biesbroek 2017). In assessing vulnerabilities and prescribing actions, regional water boards have focused primarily on the management of floods and droughts (Kamperman and Biesbroek 2017). In their comprehensive analysis of the water management plans of the regional water boards, Kamperman and Biesbroek (2017) found greater recognition of the need to act on climate adaptation, than actual adaptation actions (e.g., financial support, public engagement, regulation, changes in infrastructure), illustrating “the urgency to adapt quickly is not very prominent or missing and has not changed significantly in the period of analysis (sic 2005–​2016).”

Climate and Flood Risk Management in Hungary The Central and Eastern European (CEE) country of Hungary, a nation of 10 million people, sits in the lowlands of the Carpathian basin, encircled by the Carpathian Mountains and

Governing Flood and Climate Risks    117 the Alps. Rural agricultural lands compose much of the landscape of Hungary, particularly in the poorer, eastern region of the nation. Two major rivers bisect Hungary and the Carpathian basin. The Danube runs east-​west downstream from Vienna, Austria, to north of Budapest, where it turns to the south, cutting through the central region of Hungary. The Danube exits Hungary at its border with Serbia. The Tisza River flows from the uplands of Romania, Ukraine, and Slovakia into the eastern region of Hungary and flows southward before crossing the southern border into Serbia. Hungary has experienced occasional extreme floods over the past few centuries as well as a series of disastrous floods around the turn of the twenty-​first century. Climatologists predict warmer temperatures in this region as well as more irregular precipitation events, potentially leading to an increase in flooding (Bartholy et al. 2015). The history of the management of these two rivers and their tributaries highlights the dynamics and challenges of climate-​driven risk management across multiple levels of governance in Hungary. Several extreme floods in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries motivated the development of a structural or engineering approach to flood management in Hungary, one that included the draining of wetlands and the development of intricate systems of dikes and levees to control the flow of water in the rivers (Szlávik 2003). These changes in land and river management allowed and encouraged large-​scale agricultural production (Matczak et al. 2008; Borsos and Sendzimir 2018). This engineering approach to managing flood risks endured many extreme flooding events and multiple political changes, including the world wars and the communist era that spanned much of the twentieth century (Szlávik 2003; Albright 2011). At the end of the 1980s, Hungary and other CEE nations experienced social, economic, and political transitions during a shift from a one-​party state-​social regime to a multiparty system. During this shift, the centralized water and flood management authority was defunded and underwent a significant reduction in staff (Vari et al. 2003). However, this transition away from centralized authority was not coupled with a strengthening of local-​level civic capacity (Vari 2002). During this period of transition away from state socialism, Hungary experienced multiple devastating floods in the 1990s and early 2000s. With the adoption of the Act XXXVII of 1996 on Civil Protection, county defense committees and local governments were given the responsibility to inform the public of impending floods and mobilize residents to evacuate prior to a flood event (Vari 2002). However, as Vari describes, public passivity remained after decades of communist rule, when public engagement in government processes was minimal and a formal civil society was underdeveloped. During this period of decentralization, a “paternalist and elitist attitudes prevail on the part of the authorities, contributing to the passivity of the public” (Vari 2002, p. 211). Although public awareness of flooding and flood risks was limited (Vari 2002), many mayors in the Tisza River basin raised concern about repetitive and extensive flood damages in their communities and pressed national authorities to adopt a new strategy for flood management in collaboration with local environmental NGOs (ENGOs). This new paradigm or approach was termed “Live in Harmony with the River,” in which agricultural systems and landscapes would be more integrated with the natural flow of rivers (Pahl-​Wostl 2009; Albright 2011). During this period of transition, the Hungarian system of governance underwent a significant shift toward Europeanization as it prepared to join the European Union (Carmin and VanDeveer 2005). The core tenets that undergird

118   Elizabeth A. Albright environmental policy in the European Union were adopted by Hungary, in part due to the regulatory requirements of accession, but also as a product of norm diffusion across shared networks and capacity-​building actions by a variety of funding organizations that entered into CEE during this time period (Carmin and VanDeveer 2005; Andonova and VanDeveer 2012). These dynamics—​shifts in broad political systems, including end of the state socialist regime and accession into the European Union, in concurrence with extreme flooding events—​enabled the coalition of flood-​affected mayors, farmers, and ENGOs to push for change in how flood risks—​and rivers more broadly—​were managed (Albright 2011; Vari 2002). A leader in the environmental community describes the dynamics with leaders of the national water authority during this period. I think the main role was played by [Mr. A] who was state secretary at that time who was responsible for water management and his deputy [Mr. B]. And he was the one that told us if you know what you want, then come and tell us. So it was really uncommon for the Hungarian system, because you very rarely get heard. (Albright 2009)

In 2003, the new Vasárhelyi Terv Továbbfejlesztési (VTT) was enacted into national law. The plan included a broader and more integrated approach to flood management, including increasing retention of flood waters on floodplains, changing agricultural practices, and developing emergency reservoirs to hold back and slow the release of floodwaters (Borsos and Sendzimir 2018). Whereas the adoption of VTT signaled a novel approach to flood management in Hungary, the implementation of the full plan has been limited. Lack of central funding and lack of coordination and implementation between the ministries of environment and agriculture have been blamed for this limited implementation (Werners et al. 2009). Although the VTT was given a priority in the Environmental Protection and Infrastructure Operational Programme and in the National Rural Development Plan, funding was limited (Werners et al. 2009). Authentic engagement of stakeholders during implementation potentially stymied the plan’s progress (Werners et al. 2009). In addition, there was a lack of integration of the plan across levels of governance, with minimal adoption by regional authorities (Werners et al. 2009). Only a few of the emergency reservoirs have been constructed, and the European Union has stepped in to help finance the completion of these projects. The NGO technical expert offers its explanation of the backward movement of the plan. But just after this period after November that year, Mr. [A]‌had to resign because the water management . . . faced such strict restrictions. He had to fire so many people that he said that he cannot move on this way. He did not resign because of the VTT, but because of budgetary cuts and the decreasing of the staff. . . . After [Mr. A] and his Deputy resigned, then the whole thing came backwards. . . . Mostly because of his resignation. Mostly. After [Mr. A] was [Mr. B] and he is a real old school guy, he was one of the leaders of the planning group of the dam on the Danube and he is absolutely not a leader of the paradigm [the ecological approach to flood management]. (Albright 2009)

Scholars have argued that the VTT is insufficient to manage the risks of flooding from a changing climate (Borsos and Sendizmir 2018).

Governing Flood and Climate Risks    119

Climate Risk Governance in Hungary Over the first decade of the twenty-​first century, the European Union broadened its climate adaptation discourse and strategies, as described earlier. Over this period, Hungary started to discuss and address climate-​related risks through the frame of climate adaptation. The 19 county governments were granted authority and responsibility to develop individual county-​level climate adaptation plans as outlined in the national 2016 Environment and Energy Operational Programme. This Operational Programme was developed as a step toward reaching the Europe 2020 targets for sustainable growth and was funded in part with €3.2 billion from the European Union (European Commission 2020b). The Hungarian county-​level strategies emphasized risks from storms, floods, saturated lands, and increasing temperatures (Csete and Buzasi 2020). Most county-​level plans discuss involvement of stakeholders including NGOs and academic institutions, but an analysis of these documents by Csete and Buzasi (2020) suggests that poor and marginalized communities were not meaningfully involved in the development of these plans. The county-​level plans focus largely on technical and policy solutions and increasing awareness of climate risks; less emphasis was placed on responsibility for implementation and relative priorities across aims. In the first decade of the twenty-​first century, Hungary’s approach to managing its water resources and extreme floods shifted due to the confluence of several enabling factors, including a series of disastrous floods, a transition away from state socialism, and its accession into the European Union (Albright 2009). During the period of EU accession and concurrent catastrophic floods, local mayors and environmental organizations pushed for a shift in how floods were managed. But during these shifts in governance, the broad civil society sector remained weak and has not been fully integrated into planning processes or climate adaptation actions, thus underscoring the importance of barriers to civic engagement. Prior to EU accession, four decades of the authoritarian regimes of Rakosi and Kadar shuttered citizen engagement in the public sphere and extinguished the 1956 revolution with terror and violence. These regimes included years of intimidation and the banning of civil society organizations. The transition toward democracy saw a change in which elites dominated politics but did not lead to a reemergence of civil society among the broad public (Simon 2014). From 1998 to 2002, the initial Orbán government saw some strengthening of civil society (Simon 2014), after which increasing mistrust and fear of civil society actors across governmental administrations occurred, including an erosion of civil liberties and freedom of the media emblematic of a de-​democratization of Hungary (Bogaards 2018).

Progress Toward Resilience? The Netherlands and Hungary, despite having quite different geographies and political histories, share similarities in the climate risks they face. Both nations share a similar trajectory of initial decentralized management of water resources and infrastructure prior to the eighteenth century, with a turn toward centralized, technocratic, engineering-​based

120   Elizabeth A. Albright approaches in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. These engineered systems have been and continue to be tested by damaging and often deadly extreme flood events that are predicted to become even more extreme with climate change. As members of the European Union, the Netherlands and Hungary must navigate both on-​the-​ground climate risks as well as the requirements of flood and climate risk strategies dictated by the European Commission. Since the turn to the twenty-​first century, both nations have started to conceptualize and manage flood risks through a lens of climate adaptation, and the Netherlands has outpaced Hungary in the steps that it has taken toward climate adaptation at the national and subnational levels. The Netherlands has placed a high priority on adaptation, particularly in the water sector, including a robust research program to support initiatives (Biesbrock et al. 2010), whereas Hungary has been limited in its adoption and implementation of its new approach to flood risk management, relying heavily on EU financing. As argued in the introduction to this chapter, flood and climate risk governance arrangements that allow for and encourage sectoral integration may most effectively manage large-​scale, border-​crossing climate-​related risks (Pahl-​Wostl 2009; Pahl-​Wostl et al. 2013). However, such complex systems of governance are not without their challenges—​including the potential for higher costs of transactions and less visibility to public and civil society, thus raising potential concerns about legitimacy (Remling 2018). Climate-​related risk management, at its most effective, allows for change, adaptation and learning from experience, and is perceived by stakeholders and the public as legitimate. Furthermore, these governance systems require coordination across economic and social sectors as well as among supranational, national, and subnational governmental and nongovernmental organizations. Catastrophic flooding in both countries spurred changes in discourse and policies to manage flood risks at the start of the 2000s. In the Netherlands, the new approach of “room for the river” was adopted, and, in Hungary, the VTT was developed, adopted, but not fully implemented. During a period of relative resurgence of civil capacity and governmental trust of civic organizations, significant changes occurred in Hungary’s approach to managing floods. The dissipation of civic society engagement on the VTT in Hungary after its adoption, inadequate resources, and loss of an internal champion for the approach within the Ministry diminished and delayed its implementation. Limited financial resources in Hungary and lack of a cohesive vision across ministries stalled implementation of policy changes, particularly in the agricultural sector (Borsos and Sendizmir 2018). Since the adoption of the VTT, government trust in civil society (and vice versa) has eroded, further weakening the institutionalization of potentially more resilient approaches to flood management. In Hungary, the changes toward more resilient policies were motivated externally from local mayors and NGOs who, when granted access, influenced ministerial leaders, some of whom championed the novel and more adaptive approach. Alternatively, the Dutch “room for a river” approach to water management has taken greater hold in water management discourse and management in the Netherlands, even though the civic engagement has been thin and sectorally fragmented management remains. This new approach to management of the rivers was in part motivated by the disastrous flooding in New Orleans, a city that is also highly engineered for flood protection. In the case of Dutch flood management, the changes appear to arise from experts within national water authorities who were networked with other flood management experts, such as those in New Orleans, and Dutch resources were dedicated to funding its implementation.

Governing Flood and Climate Risks    121 In both nations, tensions have arisen at the national level across policy sectors and governing authorities—​whether between water and spatial planning authorities in the Netherlands or between ministries of agriculture and the environment in Hungary. Effective cross-​sectoral integration of flood and climate risk planning appears to be weak at best and contentious at worse. As discussed in the introduction to this chapter, climate risks—​whether floods, fires, or droughts—​span policy sectors, and effective climate risk and adaptation policies mandate integration across policy sectors. Greater integration across sectors is needed for effective climate risk governance (Biesbroek et al. 2010). The approach of the European Commission in managing climate risk and adaptation may be encouraging siloed, sectoral, and top-​down approaches to climate risk management. By adopting a technocratic and top-​down approach, the European Commission may be discouraging integration of actions across sectors as well as local-​level actions to adapt that may be most pressing for the public and may also span sectors. The legitimacy of multilevel governance arrangements often requires accountability, transparency, participatory engagement, and civil society support of outcomes (Paavola 2008; Termeer et al. 2011; Alexander et al. 2016, 2018; Hegger et al. 2016). While both nations have involved stakeholders at the national and subnational levels in developing flood risk and climate adaptation policies, scholars have pointed to limitations in their meaningful involvement (Uittenbroek et al. 2019). While local-​level actors (primarily mayors and NGOs) pressed for national changes in flood risk management policies (the VTT) in Hungary, meaningful engagement decreased during implementation of the VTT. Stakeholder and public engagement have also been weak at the subnational level in climate adaptation policy, especially from underresourced communities (Csete and Buzasi 2020). Barriers exist to meaningful civil society engagement in flood and climate risk management in both nations. In the Netherlands, these roadblocks to useful participation likely stem from centuries of expert, technocratic management of the highly engineered structures. Public engagement in the Netherlands may continue to face challenges in engaging civil society if the engineered structures continue to protect the citizenry from the devastation of flooding. However, as risks shift and new strategies are needed to divert flood waters, the Netherlands could consider novel approaches to engage the public on highly technical risks and policy preferences. In 2020, the Dutch government involved more than 30,000 members of the public to elicit their preferences of COVID-​19 mitigation policies in an online platform, and more than 80 percent of participants supported the process of public engagement (Mouter et al. 2021), suggesting that civil society participation in risk mitigation policy development is possible. The participants were offered a selection of policies, the projected impacts of policies, and constraints to their adoption (Mouter et al. 2021). Scaled to local communities or regional authorities, similar novel approaches to elicit information about perceived vulnerabilities, risk perceptions, and policy preferences may prove useful to subnational and national governments in adopting climate adaptation policies. In Hungary, many decades of authoritarian regimes, followed most recently by a government that has undermined the development of civil society, has frayed the capacity for robust public engagement. As such, the European Union, in addition to mandating public engagement in the EUWFD and other policies, should offer increased financial and technical assistance to build the capacity of subnational and national civil society actors. Strengthening of the civil society sector capacity to participate in public processes broadly may encourage more in-​depth participation in climate-​related risk governance.

122   Elizabeth A. Albright

Note 1. According to the European Commission Scorecard on National Adaptation Strategies (NAS), stakeholders included “four provincial governments, 11 municipalities, four regional health organisations, four regional water authorities, the three associations of provinces, municipalities and regional water authorities (IPO, VNG, and UvW), six research institutes (KNMI, PBL, RIVM, Deltares, WUR), 15 engineering and consultancy organisations, four NGOs, two insurance organisations, one Safety Region, and ten miscellaneous organisations among which the Dutch National Bank, Rioned (the sewerage institute) and Prorail (Railway infrastructure)” (European Commission 2018, p. 11).

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124   Elizabeth A. Albright Hansen, Henning Sten, and Milla Mäenpää. “An Overview of the Challenges for Public Participation in River Basin Management and Planning.” Management of Environmental Quality: An International Journal 19, no. 1 (2008): 67–​84. Hegger, Dreis L., Peter P. Driessen, Carel Dieperink, Mark Wiering, G. T. Tom Raadgever, and Helen F. van Rijswick. “Assessing Stability and Dynamics in Flood Risk Governance.” Water Resources Management 28, no. 12 (2014): 4127–​4142. Hegger, Dreis L., Peter P. Driessen, Mark Wiering, Helena F. Van Rijswick, Zbigniew W. Kundzewicz, Piotr Matczak, and Ann Crabbe. “Toward More Flood Resilience: Is a Diversification of Flood Risk Management Strategies the Way Forward?” Ecology and Society 21, no. 4 (2016): 52. https://​doi.org/​10.5751/​ES-​08854-​210​452. Hoeksema, Robert J. “Three Stages in the History of Land Reclamation in the Netherlands.” Irrigation and Drainage: The journal of the International Commission on Irrigation and Drainage 56, no. S1 (2007): S113–​S126. Huntjens, Patrick, Claudia Pahl-​Wostl, Benoit Rihoux, Maja Schlüter, Zsuzsanna Flachner, Susana Neto, Romana Koskova, Chris Dickens, and Isah Nabide Kiti. “Adaptive Water Management and Policy Learning in a Changing Climate: A Formal Comparative Analysis of Eight Water Management Regimes in Europe, Africa and Asia.” Environmental Policy and Governance 21, no. 3 (2011): 145–​163. Johnson, Clare L., and Sally J. Priest. “Flood Risk Management in England: A Changing Landscape of Risk Responsibility?” International Journal of Water Resources Development 24, no. 4 (2008): 513–​525. Jongman, Brenden, Stefan Hochrainer-​Stigler, Luc Feyen, Jeroen C. Aerts, Reinhard Mechler, Woutzer W. Botzen, Laurens M. Bouwer, George Pflug, Rodrigo Rojas, and Phillip J. Ward. “Increasing Stress on Disaster-​Risk Finance Due to Large Floods.” Nature Climate Change 4, no. 4 (2014): 264–​268. Kamperman, Hans, and Robbert Biesbroek. “Measuring Progress on Climate Change Adaptation Policy by Dutch Water Boards.” Water Resources Management 31, no. 14 (2017): 4557–​4570. Korfmacher, Katrina Smith. “Water Quality Modeling for Environmental Management Lessons from the Policy Sciences.” Policy Sciences 31, no. 1 (1998): 35–​54. Korfmacher, Katrina Smith. “The Politics of Participation in Watershed Modeling.” Environmental Management 27, no. 2 (2001): 161–​176. Kuks, Stefan. “The Evolution of the Water Regime in the Netherlands.” In The Evolution of National Water Regimes in Europe, edited by Kuks S, Kissling-​Näf I, 87–​141. Dordrecht: Springer, 2004. Lioubimtseva, Elena, and Charlotte da Cunha. “Local Climate Change Adaptation Plans in the US and France: Comparison and Lessons Learned in 2007–​2017.” Urban Climate 31 (2020): 100577. Matczak, Piotr, Zsuzsanna Flachner, and Saskia E. Werners. “Institutions for Adapting to Climate Change in the Tisza River Basin.” Klimá 21 Füzetek 55 (2008): 87–​100. Mostert, Erik. “Integrated Water Resources Management in the Netherlands: How Concepts Function.” Journal of Contemporary Water Research and Education 135, no. 1 (2006): 19–​27. Mouter, Niek, Jose Ignacio Hernandez, and Anatol Valerian Itten. “Public Participation in Crisis Policymaking: How 30,000 Dutch Citizens Advised Their Government on Relaxing COVID-​19 Lockdown Measures.” PloS One 16, no. 5 (2021): e0250614. Orr, Bart, Amy Stodghill, and Lucia Candu. “The Dutch Experience in Flood Management: A History of Institutional Learning.” In Case Study Prepared for Enhancing Urban Safety and

Governing Flood and Climate Risks    125 Security: Global Report on Human Settlements, 2007. https://​unhabi​tat.org/​sites/​defa​ult/​ files/​2008/​07/​GRHS.2007.CaseSt​udy.Neth​erla​nds.pdf Paavola, Jouni. “Science and Social Justice in the Governance of Adaptation to Climate Change.” Environmental Politics 17, no. 4 (2008): 644–​659. Pahl-​Wostl, Claudia. “A Conceptual Framework for Analysing Adaptive Capacity and Multi-​ Level Learning Processes in Resource Governance Regimes.” Global Environmental Change 19, no. 3(2009): 354–​365. Pahl-​Wostl, Claudia, Gert Becker, Christian Knieper, and Jan Sendzimir. “How Multilevel Societal Learning Processes Facilitate Transformative Change: A Comparative Case Study Analysis on Flood Management.” Ecology and Society 18, no. 4 (2013): 58. http://​dx.doi.org/​ 10.5751/​ES-​05779-​180​458 Pilarczyk, K. W. 2006. “Flood Protection and Management in the Netherlands.” In Extreme Hydrological Events: New Concepts for Security, edited by O. F. Vasiliev, P. H. A. J. M. van Gelder, E. J. Plate and M. V. Bolgov, 385–​407. Dordrecht: Springer, 2006. Priest, Sally J., Cathy Suykens, Helena F. Van Rijswick, Thomas Schellenberger, Susana Goytia, Zbigniew W. Kundzewicz, Willemijn J. van Doorn-​Hoekveld, Jean-​Christophe Beyers, and S. Homewood, S. “The European Union Approach to Flood Risk Management and Improving Societal Resilience: Lessons from the Implementation of the Floods Directive in Six European countries.” Ecology and Society 21, no. 4 (2016): 50. https://​doi.org/​10.5751/​ ES-​08913-​210​450. Remling, Elise. “Depoliticizing Adaptation: A Critical Analysis of EU Climate Adaptation Policy.” Environmental Politics 27, no. 3 (2018): 477–​497. Renn, Ortwin. “White Paper on Risk Governance: Toward an Integrative Framework.” In Global Risk Governance Walker, 3–​73. Eds. Ortwin Renn and Katherine D. Walker. Dordrecht: Springer, 2008. Restemeyer, Britta, Margo van den Brink, and Johan Woltjer. “Between Adaptability and the Urge to Control: Making Long-​Term Water Policies in the Netherlands.” Journal of Environmental Planning and Management 60, no. 5 (2017): 920–​940. Rijkswaterstaat. Ministerie van Infrastructuur en Waterstaat. National Water Plan, 2009–​2015. 2009. https://​puc.overh​eid.nl/​rijk​swat​erst​aat/​doc/​PUC_​13​6175​_​31/​. Rowe, Gene, and Lynn J. Frewer. “Public Participation Methods: A Framework for Evaluation.” Science, Technology, & Human Values 25, no. 1 (2000): 3–​29. Sabatier, Paul A., Will Focht, Mark Lubell, Zev Trachtenberg, and Arnold Vedlitz, eds. Swimming Upstream: Collaborative Approaches to Watershed Management. Boston: MIT Press, 2005. Schulz, Karsten, and Rapti Siriwardane. “Depoliticised and Technocratic? Normativity and the Politics of Transformative Adaptation.” Earth System Governance. 2015. http://​cris.leib​ niz-​zmt.de/​id/​epr​int/​2475/​1/​Siri​ward​ane%202​015.pdf Selin, Henrik and Stacy D. VanDeveer. 2015. European Union and Environmental Governance. London: Routledge, 2015. Simon, János. “Non-​Participative Political Culture in Hungary–​Why Are the Participatory Pillars of Democratic Political Culture Weak in Hungary?” Central European Papers 2, no. 1 (2014): 167–​188. Stowa. “Floods Directive.” 2021. https://​www.stowa.nl/​del​tafa​cts/​wate​rvei​ligh​eid/​delta-​facts-​ engl​ish-​versi​ons/​flo​ods-​direct​ive#Gov​erna​nce Szlávik, Lajos. The Development Policy of Flood Control in Hungary. Budapest: Department of Water Management and Informatics, Water Resources Research Centre (VITUKI), 2003.

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Chapter 7

The P oliti c s of Climate Dis ast e rs , So cial Inequa l i t y, and Percep t i ons of Governm ent As si sta nc e Isabella Alcañiz and Ana Ivelisse Sanchez-​R ivera Not long ago, natural disasters happened when and where they were expected: earthquakes occurred near geological fault lines; flooding, mostly in areas with a tropical rain season; and droughts, in barren lands. They happened infrequently and seldom became record-​ breaking, once-​in-​a-​lifetime events that strain social resources to an extreme. Not anymore. Climate change and widespread environmental degradation have led to a wave of catastrophes that often defy forecasting expertise. Government assistance to recover and rebuild in the aftermath of rapidly succeeding climate disasters is getting more expensive and, as a result, more politicized. No longer isolated, rare events, disasters, and the politics that stem from them are ready for prime-​time comparative studies. In this chapter, we take up the pressing yet unanswered question of how we can best study the comparative politics of climate disasters (also see Albright, in this volume). We examine federal disaster assistance and suggest a research question central to the politics of any climate disaster: Who do citizens believe are responsible for aftermath relief? We analyze the issue of responsibility attribution—​and the related question of who voters believe deserves government disaster relief—​against three devastating 2017 hurricanes, with a special focus on the impact of Hurricane Maria on Puerto Rico. We begin to answer the questions of responsibility and deservingness with survey data collected by us in a pilot study on the Island of Puerto Rico. We also draw from a University of Maryland (UMD) survey with an oversample of Hispanic respondents fielded in the continental United States in 2018. We find great promise for research in comparative disaster politics that investigates how attitudes on political responsibility attribution vary across political systems. The study of responsibility attribution and victim deservingness reveals voters’ attitudes toward the

128    Isabella Alcañiz and Ana Ivelisse Sanchez-Rivera government, citizens, and residents, and exposes built-​in barriers to effective disaster intervention. Understanding the expectations voters hold of the role of government and individuals is critical in democracies where these beliefs help shape state emergency responses. Furthermore, because the survey data show how existing social inequality significantly interacts with government assistance, we argue for the need to include a distributive dimension in any future climate disaster analysis. We conclude this chapter with a call to examine the fertile connections between the study of climate disaster politics and the broader comparative research agenda. We find special potential in subnational and regime politics as well as in gender and social inequality.

Puerto Rico and Hurricane Maria Before turning our attention to the survey analysis, in this section we offer a brief discussion of the political status of the island and the devastating effect of Hurricane Maria in 2017. Technically, Puerto Rico is the oldest colony in the world. In 1898, after the Spanish American War, the island, along with Guam and the Philippines, went from being an autonomous Spanish territory to becoming part of the United States’ spoils of war. In 1917, the United States decided to extend American citizenship to Puerto Ricans. However, while island residents are US citizens, they lack full political and economic autonomy from Washington DC. Puerto Rico is a self-​governing Commonwealth and is classified as an “unincorporated territory,” whereby the US federal government has jurisdiction over many policy areas, including disaster assistance. Before Hurricane Maria devastated the island and its economy, Puerto Rico was already in a declared state of fiscal emergency. In 2016, the United States unilaterally established a financial oversight board to restructure Puerto Rican debt and implement austerity measures (i.e., the 2016 Puerto Rico Oversight, Management, and Economic Stability Act or PROMESA).1 Under increased economic hardship and rampant corruption, Puerto Ricans started to engage in protests and middle-​ class migration to the continental United States rose before the storm. On September 7, 2017, Hurricane Irma passed next to Puerto Rico as a Category 5 hurricane. Its eye passed close to the northeastern part of the island but its winds and rain were enough to weaken the public infrastructure, houses, hospitals, and partially collapse the electric grid. Only 2 weeks later, on September 20, 2017, Hurricane Maria’s eye entered the island from the southeast and exited through the northwest with winds just a few miles short of becoming a Category 5 hurricane. The hurricane battered the entire island for 12 straight hours with roaring winds that reached 200 mph and rain that dumped close to 40 inches of water. While pummeling the island, Hurricane Maria killed more than five dozen people, destroyed more than 470,000 homes, and left 100% of the island without power and 60% of the population without water. It left residents isolated and unable to communicate because it damaged more than 90% of the telecommunication towers and destroyed major roads and bridges. It had a direct impact on Puerto Ricans’ food security by breaking more than 98% of the adult trees and destroying the entirety of coffee and plantain crops. The total damage of Hurricane Maria on the Island of Puerto Rico has been estimated at $94 billion.2

The Politics of Climate Disasters, Social Inequality    129 The indirect effects of Hurricane Maria became evident months later and are still being tallied today. The official death toll was raised to approximately 2,975, in part due to the casualties caused by the lack of electricity in both hospitals and homes. Lost power also contributed to an outbreak of “leptospirosis, a bacterial disease transmitted through water and soil, especially after storms and flood” that directly caused the death of at least 26 people.3 The power grid was restored 1 year after Hurricane Maria made landfall, but even 3 years later the grid has not been repaired in full. Thousands of families are still living under temporary blue tarps, and many have been unable to return to their homes. The slow economic recovery affected businesses and the ability of people to go back to their pre-​ Maria jobs (e.g., if the business was destroyed or the economic priority of clients changed).

Pilot Online Survey in Puerto Rico To engage victims of Hurricane Maria, we conducted a pilot online study using a snowball sampling strategy in Puerto Rico. The poll was available through Qualtrics for the first 2 weeks of May in 2019 and was completed via smartphone or computer. The questionnaire was an abbreviated Spanish version of a national survey conducted in the continental United States in 2018 by the UMD and Nielson Scarborough with an oversample of Hispanics.4 The Puerto Rican pilot survey included 15 questions from the continental US poll, in addition to detailed demographic questions. Different from the UMD Hispanics Survey, our pilot poll included multiple options for open-​ended answers. The questions were designed to understand the Puerto Rican socioeconomic context, and our analysis of the data is further informed by in-​person interviews conducted earlier that year, in January 2019, by one of the authors.5 The purpose of our pilot survey was to gather experiences of Puerto Ricans living on the island during Hurricane Maria, which in turn could be contrasted to responses given by respondents in the continental United States who had not experienced a major disaster like Hurricane Maria. The inclusion criteria specified participants had to be 18 years or older and have lived in Puerto Rico when Hurricane Maria hit the island in September 2017. The pilot sample of n =​86 (65% women) is based on participants who completed all the questions. The total number of respondents, including those who left a question unanswered, was 105. The median participant age was 34 years old (range 21 to 75 years) and the overall sample skewed toward college-​educated. Approximately 27% of the participants had an education higher than a bachelor’s degree (BA), 34% held a BA diploma, and 29% had an associate’s degree (16%) or some college education. Even though 38% of the sample reported to earn $15,000 or less and 20% between $15,000 and $25,000, on the Puerto Rican context, the sample could be considered as a middle class since approximately 21% earned between $25,000 and $50,000, 8% between $50,000 and $75,000, and 13% more than $75,000. When asked about their race, 63% self-​identified as white, 16% black, and 21% as other. We also asked questions about the island’s political status. About 90% of the participants reported that, if they could decide the United States-​Puerto Rico political status, they would choose one of the current three options. Approximately 28% favored the current Commonwealth status, 36% said they would choose statehood and 26% independence. Interestingly, despite the pilot survey not being a random sample, these results mirror the

130    Isabella Alcañiz and Ana Ivelisse Sanchez-Rivera three-​way break regarding the political status of the island found in past referendums by Puerto Ricans.6 We wanted to create a survey sample made up in its entirety of victims of a natural disaster to raise the stakes associated with our questions. At the time of the survey, 42% lived in a municipality (municipio) within the San Juan capital metropolitan region, 17% in a county from the North, an additional 17% East, 11% Central, and 6% from the South or West. Six percent of the participants lived in the continental United States at the time of the survey but reported living in an Eastern or Central municipality during Maria. Even when close to everyone surveyed in our pilot study was still living on the island at the moment of the poll, about half of those included reported that they had considered migrating before Hurricane Maria (with 6% of the sample saying that the storm made them consider leaving).

Responsibility Attribution in Disaster Politics In this section, we examine the issue of responsibility attribution and the related question on the perceived deservingness of disaster victims by delving into the results of our pilot online survey in Puerto Rico. To add breadth to our analysis, we include some results from the 2018 UMD Hispanics survey as well.

Does the Government Have Responsibility to Intervene in the Aftermath of a Disaster? As a theoretical focal point, responsibility attribution offers great potential to further the study of comparative disaster politics (Achen and Bartels 2012; Konisky 2011; Malhotra and Kuo 2008; Gomez and Wilson 2008; Arceneaux and Stein 2006). Natural disasters are seen as “acts of God” that occur outside of human control. Because they are no one’s fault, citizens are more likely to expect the government to intervene—​that is, “to do something”—​in the aftermath. Indeed, our surveys show that, regardless of age, partisanship, or other factors, a majority of respondents say the government—​rather than the individual—​is responsible for relief and post-​disaster assistance. For example, when asked whether “government has a responsibility to help people deal with and recover from natural disasters or individuals have a responsibility to be self-​sufficient when it comes to natural disasters” more than 70% in the 2018 UMD Hispanic poll choose the former. In our pilot online survey in Puerto Rico, we find similar response rates, with more than 80% of participants agreeing that it is the government’s responsibility—​over the individual—​to help people respond to and recover from natural disasters. However, when we control for the partisan identification of survey participants, we see a shift. In the UMD Hispanic survey, 53% of self-​identified Republican respondents find that the government is responsible for providing assistance after a disaster against 89% of Democratic respondents who find the government responsible. A 2019 UMD survey that asked the same question shows this partisan difference holding, with 59% of Republicans

The Politics of Climate Disasters, Social Inequality    131 and 90% of Democrats stating that the government is responsible for helping people deal with a natural disaster. Given that the number of climate disasters continues to grow and the polarization around government assistance intensifies, we expect partisan attitudes to widen. Future comparative research on the politics of disaster should inquire into the factors that change people’s perceptions of government responsibility. This question directly connects to a broader literature in comparative politics, which examines how citizens support and access social welfare. As we discuss later, we find potential in drawing from the study of voters’ support of welfare and distributive politics—​a central question of the comparative scholarship—​to advance our understanding of climate disaster (Reeskens and van Oorschot 2015; Van Der Waal, De Koster, and Van Oorschot 2013; DeSante 2013; Reid 2013; Filindra 2013 Gainous, Craig, and Martinez 2008; Larsen 2008; Marchevsky and Theoharis 2006; Federico 2005; Alesina, Glaeser, and Sacerdote 2001; Skocpol 1995). The study of distributive politics seeks to explain how government resources are allocated across the population (Stokes et al. 2013). Traditionally, distributive research focused on the allocation of social and welfare policy, such as unemployment benefits, housing, and healthcare (Alesina et al. 2001; Golden and Min 2013; Stokes et al. 2013; Rueda and Stegmueller 2019). Studies have shown that support for government welfare spending tends to be partisan, polarized, and contingent on citizens’ biases and expectations regarding the deservingness of beneficiaries (Alesina et al. 2001; Marchevsky and Theoharis 2006; Gainous et al. 2008). On the other hand, government spending on natural disasters has been less politicized as beneficiaries are seen as victims of “acts of God” who, through no fault of their own, require state assistance. In this sense, disaster assistance can be thought of as insurance, whereby the state steps in to ensure that citizens “obtain protection against risks that private insurance markets fail to cover” (Moene and Wallerstein 2001, pp. 859–​860). But with climate change, the number and magnitude of disasters continue to accelerate. Because of this, support for disaster assistance may begin to mirror support for welfare spending, becoming more politicized and focused on the personal attributes of beneficiaries, such as gender, race, ethnicity, or nationality (Reid 2013; Alcañiz et al. 2019; Stephens-​Dougan 2021). Perceptions of government responsibility toward climate victims may change, too. Similar to the welfare literature, we posit that understanding voters’ preferences for the allocation of government disaster assistance helps uncover the nature of state–​ society relations (Alesina et al. 2001; Golden and Min 2013; Stokes et al. 2013; Rueda and Stegmueller 2019).

The Perceived Deservingness of Victims and What Type of Government Disaster Assistance Is Supported What types of relief intervention are supported by voters? Typically, the state agencies with primary jurisdiction in natural disaster recovery and relief, such as the Federal Emergency Management Agency in the United States (FEMA) or the Emergency Response Coordination Centre of the European Union, offer a range of assistance options. In Puerto Rico and the continental United States, FEMA may provide victims with temporary housing, home repair, or home replacement.7

132    Isabella Alcañiz and Ana Ivelisse Sanchez-Rivera The availability of different types of assistance to victims of natural disasters leads us to the question of beneficiaries. In the public’s mind, are all disaster victims deserving of the same help? Following the 2018 UMD Hispanics survey, we asked participants in our 2019 pilot survey in Puerto Rico how they thought the US government should respond to and assist its citizens in the event of a natural disaster. We gave them five possible interventions and they could select all that applied:

1. Provide people and supplies for immediate search and rescue 2. Provide financial support for immediate needs to families affected 3. Provide supplies and support staff until local utilities are back working 4. Provide financial support to pay for rebuilding of infrastructure and utilities 5. Provide financial support to pay for rebuilding of private homes and property

All but three respondents selected multiple interventions. Frequencies of responses ranged from 63% supporting government assistance in rebuilding infrastructure and utilities to 76% supporting the provision of supplies and staff for local utilities. Interestingly, when this same question was originally fielded in the UMD Hispanic survey, continental US-​ based respondents chose options 1 through 4 at similar rates as Puerto Rican respondents. However, when asked if the US government should help citizens financially rebuild homes, only 39% of continental US-​based respondents agreed, compared to 70% of Puerto Rican survey participants. Given the sample size of our Puerto Rican pilot study, we caution against making any conclusive comparisons between the two surveys. However, we do find it noteworthy that island-​based respondents tend to support more generous federal intervention and to make it available to more recipients. Indeed, we see these two issues—​type of intervention and recipient eligibility—​as somewhat connected in respondents’ minds. That is, if voters understand federal disaster assistance as constituting a menu of interventions, with some being more generous than others, then it follows that voters may ask who should receive these different interventions. In another replication of the UMD Hispanic survey, we asked Puerto Rican respondents who should get financial help from FEMA or other US government agencies after damages suffered as a result of weather-​related natural disasters (e.g., flooding, hurricanes, or wildfires). Participants were asked to select all potential beneficiaries from the following list.

1. Homeowners with insurance 2. Homeowners without insurance 3. US citizens 4. Noncitizens who are US residents 5. Small businesses 6. Large corporations

Again, an overwhelming majority of Puerto Rican respondents support federal assistance to all of these actors except large corporations, including insured homeowners (66%) and noncitizens (91%). In a growing anti-​immigrant climate, noncitizens as recipient of government benefits may be seen as controversial even if they are legal residents receiving

The Politics of Climate Disasters, Social Inequality    133 disaster assistance. The same question asked by the UMD Hispanic Survey also gets a majority of respondents supporting assistance to noncitizens (61%). However, when we cross that item with nationality background, we find that 71% of Hispanic respondents’ support extending disaster benefits to noncitizens whereas only 52% of non-​Hispanics do. While still a majority, we see a 20% drop in support by group. When we control by partisanship, the difference gets wider. While only 39% of Republicans surveyed in the continental United States support disaster assistance for non-​US citizen residents, more than 75% of Democrats do. What explains citizens’ varying support for different types of federal disaster intervention and beneficiaries? The effects of partisanship and national identity in our survey results may offer some clues. We know that political and social identities drive attitudes on government services, such as in education, immigration, and welfare benefits (Alesina et al. 2001; Federico 2005; Gainous et al. 2008; Larsen 2008; Filindra 2013; Van Der Waal et al. 2013). In particular, the continual racialization of American politics exacerbates the impact of social identities on the question of who deserves government help (Skocpol 1995; Alesina et al 2001; Marchevsky and Theoharis 2006; Larsen 2008; Reid 2013; Van Der Waal et al. 2013; Alcañiz et al. 2019). Often because of negative stereotypes and bigotry, minority and noncitizen communities are perceived as less deserving of assistance (Marchevsky and Theoharris 2006; DeSante 2013; Reeskens and van Oorschot 2015; Alcañiz et al. 2019). The link between racial attitudes and welfare support has been studied at length in American redistributive politics. Antiblack sentiment creates the context for poverty-​relief policies such as welfare to be racialized, viewed as undesirable, and perceived to be abused by those who fail to demonstrate a strong work ethic. Whites’ perceptions of Latinos also shape anti-​welfare views. (Watkins-​Hayes and Kovalsky 2016, p. 197)

As the growing price tag of disaster relief entails steeper redistributive costs, should we expect “social antipathies—​including race, gender and class biases” to shape policy support in an area where recipients need government help “through no fault of their own” (Watkins-​ Hayes and Kovalsky 2016, p. 196)? Our survey data hint at a shift in public perception of the eligibility criteria for disaster victims driven by social identities and partisanship. Early research on the COVID-​19 pandemic and support for public health measures seem to confirm this trend (Allcott et al. 2020; Calvo and Ventura 2021; Romer and Jamieson 2020). We see great potential for a comparative research agenda in the study of deservingness politics and climate disasters. We believe this is a critical area of study because of how mass attitudes and political support help determine where and in whom the government invests protection.

Who’s Responsible for the Aftermath? Voters judge whether the interventions by political leaders are making things better or worse, even for “acts of God” like natural disasters (Achen and Bartels 2012; Malhotra and Kuo 2008; Arceneaux and Stein 2006). Who is ultimately politically responsible for the effectiveness of the intervention? This is the classic question of the responsibility attribution

134    Isabella Alcañiz and Ana Ivelisse Sanchez-Rivera and economic voting literature and has great potential as a research agenda applied to disaster politics. Who’s responsible for the relief efforts according to our Puerto Rican pilot survey? Not surprisingly, survey participants judged state intervention in the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Maria in a mostly negative light and were critical of both the federal government in Washington DC and the island’s governor in San Juan. Regarding the former, most of the criticism fell on FEMA. The vast majority of Puerto Rican respondents experienced some type of material loss due to Hurricane Maria but only half had filed a claim with FEMA. Those who opted not to file a claim explained their decision by a number of reasons. They said they were annoyed by FEMA’s red tape, they felt they lacked sufficient paperwork and evidence to support a claim, they were renters and the property owner of their rental unit filed the claim, they believed there were worse cases on the island with larger needs ahead of theirs, they were insured (even though they believed they were underinsured). Participants in our pilot survey experienced many material losses that were not necessarily covered by FEMA or their own insurance, for the few cases of respondents who mentioned having private coverage. Many reported losing their cars and/​or appliances (stove, refrigerator, washing and drying machines, TVs, and desktops) due to flooding, which was not covered by FEMA but was still very costly to replace. Others reported losing their roofs and with it most of their furniture because of the rains. Other kinds of losses included their jobs, work tools or supplies, food, and vital documents. At least four respondents summarized the devastation brought on by Hurricane Maria in the same way by stating “we lost everything.” Of those participants who filed claims, 41% said they received no monetary assistance from FEMA; 39% received less than one-​quarter of the value of their damaged property; 18%, between one-​quarter and half; and only 2% reported receiving between half and three-​ quarters of the value they lost (none reported receiving above three-​quarters of the value of their losses). Respondents were asked to share the reasons given by FEMA to deny assistance: “according to them, we did not qualify”; “they said that was the only amount we qualified for”; “the property did not experience structural damage”; “did not have proper documentation”; “sufficient income”; and “already had insurance.” This last reason was challenged by survey participants who claimed their existing insurance did not cover some of the types of damage suffered: “They [FEMA] inspected the home, next day they already had made a decision to not help us because we had private insurance. . . . The private insurance still has not responded for the house’s structural damages such as the cracks” (man, 29, from Guaynabo). Another respondent stated, “We had insurance but the reality is that the bank did not pay for anything because it was a flood” (woman, 30, from San Juan). The catastrophic effect of a natural disaster on top of existing socioeconomic vulnerabilities is exemplified by what respondents said in open-​ended responses: “There were some people that did not experience major losses but they needed money to buy food, gas, cloth or medicines, we did not receive anything” (woman, 24, from Toa Alta). One respondent reveals how quickly vulnerable families can go hungry when disasters hit and government response is uneven. “I did not know what to feed my children. We exhausted everything and I panicked and it was in December, two months after the hurricane when we received help from FEMA. When you have kids and you run out of money and you don’t see anything in the store to buy you get that feeling of ‘what am I supposed to do?’ We suffered from hunger. I can’t deny it, we had two meals a day and breakfast was technically a snack, a piece of bread

The Politics of Climate Disasters, Social Inequality    135 with water, we ate heavier during dinner. As parents, we went hungry so our kids could eat. FEMA response was not immediate” (woman, 33, from Luquillo). Loans, a common market-​based assistance mechanism of FEMA, are not particularly welcome by economically vulnerable storm victims (Begley et al. 2020). Most participants reported that FEMA offered them a loan, and they gave negative marks to the federal agency because of it. A respondent stated, “some received a loan but not everyone can pay for them because of the island’s low income” (woman, 27, from Toa Alta), pointing to the inability to take on a loan after losing everything due to a natural disaster. Proper titling and proof of ownership is a major obstacle to receiving effective government assistance and was brought up by many participants to justify their criticisms of FEMA. Respondents made reference to documentation being destroyed during the hurricane. “I saw homes from my community and others that were destroyed and did not receive a response from FEMA. I know that it’s part of the agency’s protocol that the house must have all the necessary documents, etc. but I think it is inhumane to leave a person living on the street. I think that in disasters like Maria, people should be helped in the best possible ways regardless of the paperwork. No one, not the government or FEMA, should accept leaving people homeless or in poor living conditions” (woman, 74, from San Juan). Furthermore, “House owners claimed the insurance and we [renters], who really suffered loss, could not claim anything” (woman, 38, from Orocovis). On the matter of titling, survey participants blamed the federal rather than the local government. “They should’ve known more about the communities on the island. . . . Not everyone has a title of their house, even before the disaster” (woman, 61, from Cataño). Hurricane Maria made landfall in Puerto Rico on September 20, 2017, less than a month after Hurricane Harvey devastated the city of Houston and only 10 days after Hurricane Irma made landfall in the state of Florida. FEMA has been accused of providing Puerto Rico with inferior services and with less urgency than Texas and Florida (Willison et al 2019; Murray 2019). To many, Hurricane Maria exposed the colonial status of the island (Cabán 2020) and the inattention that Puerto Rico experiences from the US government even when the Stafford Act “forbids discriminatory allotment of aid relief ” to US disaster victims. (Morris, Hayward, and Otero 2018; Murray 2019). We asked participants in the pilot survey to compare the relief efforts by FEMA after the three hurricanes, Harvey (Texas), Irma (Florida), and Maria (Puerto Rico). A clear majority of respondents were aware of all three responses by FEMA. When they compared the agency’s interventions in Texas and Florida to the one after Hurricane Maria, 80% of respondents believed that FEMA performed worse in Puerto Rico. A male participant (58) from San Juan said “FEMA has a history of inefficiency evidenced in New Orleans. The protocol implemented in Puerto Rico was never tested before (overseas protocol) and it was a failure complemented by the Trump Administration’s contempt. Any city of the [continental] United States would not have endured what happened on the island.” What explains respondents’ comparisons of government disaster response? While our small pilot study in Puerto Rico does not allow us to dig too deeply, the UMD Hispanics survey offers some indication of intervening factors. The question (which we replicated in our pilot poll) asked continental US respondents: “Thinking of the hurricanes last year, how would you rate the federal government’s response and assistance to the affected areas?” Answers were on a scale of Poor, Satisfactory, or Good for Hurricane Harvey in Texas; Hurricane Irma in Florida; and Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico. When we control for Hispanic and non-​Hispanic respondents we get very similar response frequencies

136    Isabella Alcañiz and Ana Ivelisse Sanchez-Rivera within Hurricane: both groups of participants evaluate US federal intervention as mostly satisfactory and good in Texas and Florida (55% and 63%, respectively, when asked about Harvey and 52% and 60%, respectively, when asked about Irma). We see a slightly larger difference between Hispanic and non-​Hispanic respondents when asked about federal assistance to victims of Hurricane Maria. Perhaps not surprisingly, responses are flipped, with 62% Hispanic and 53% non-​Hispanic respondents stating federal intervention was poor. However, when we control for partisanship, the gap widens considerably, especially in the case of Hurricane Maria. When asked about Hurricane Harvey, 66% of Republican participants say federal assistance was satisfactory or good to 57% of Democrats. But when asked about Puerto Rico, 21% of Republican respondents rate the US government’s intervention as poor compared to almost all participating Democrats, with 84% negatively judging federal assistance. Research on economic voting has found that citizens may distribute blame among different political actors, and often the national government is not their sole target of responsibility (Alcañiz and Hellwig 2011; Malhotra and Kuo 2008; Arceneaux and Stein 2006). That is, voters may distribute responsibility to other domestic and even international actors, from local business to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) (Alcañiz and Hellwig 2011). This is expected, particularly in multilevel democracies (León, Jurado, Garmendia Madariaga 2018; Hobolt and Tilley 2014.). When thinking of climate disasters, we predict voters will have strong incentives to distribute blame among different political actors (Gomez and Wilson 2008; Malhotra and Kuo 2008; Arceneaux and Stein 2006). We test for this expectation in our pilot survey. Even though disaster relief falls under the jurisdiction of the federal government in Puerto Rico (and most national governments across the world), many participants in our pilot poll placed equal fault on the local and federal administrations: “There was a complete disorganization and neglect from FEMA, the local and the federal government” (man, 50, from San Juan). In answering the question “who’s to blame?” many participants of our pilot study outright blamed the Puerto Rican governor and the local administration. “The main problem was the local management by politicians seeking to maintain their position” (man, 38, San Juan). Another respondent said: “The governor [of Puerto Rico] was responsible for FEMA’s response, because he informed that there were 16 casualties due to the hurricane when there was no accurate information and it was known that there had been many more. When they realize that they lost millions, then they started to increase the number of dead. The government of Puerto Rico was the culprit of the mess not the government of the US and much less FEMA” (man, no age available, Cabo Rojo). Yet another, “Really, the response to this event seemed like an insult to me from the government of Puerto Rico because even though FEMA did not assign equal number of resources compared to other states, the Puerto Rican government is a very bad administrator. On the other hand, I found President Trump’s performance even worse as the representative of the United States in Puerto Rico. Disgusting! I believe that in general the US has always seen us as inferior and an economic burden despite the fact that Puerto Rico generates money inflows. FEMA earned an F for my part, I don’t owe it anything” (woman, 30, Corozal). While we cannot examine further some of the possible factors affecting this distribution of blame in our pilot Puerto Rican survey, the UMD Hispanics survey allows us to go deeper. In the continental US survey, respondents were asked: “Who do you hold most responsible for the deaths in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria?” They were given one of four options

The Politics of Climate Disasters, Social Inequality    137 to answer: President Trump, FEMA (the federal government), the Puerto Rican government, and Puerto Ricans themselves for not evacuating. Interestingly, when we analyze response frequencies by Hispanic/​non-​Hispanic, we see somewhat similar distributions of blame, with a slightly larger margin of Hispanic respondents blaming President Trump for the casualties on the island (33–​25% of non-​Hispanic respondents). However, when we cross-​tabulate this question with the self-​identified partisanship of participants, we discover a starker contrast. While only 7% of Republican respondents find President Trump and FEMA responsible, 71% of study Democrats do. Conversely, a whopping 92% of Republican respondents blame the Puerto Rican government (63%) and Puerto Ricans themselves (29%) for Hurricane Maria-​related deaths, whereas only 29% of Democrats do. We believe our analysis of this survey data adds to a growing body of scholarship that examines the polarizing effects of partisanship affiliation in disaster politics, including the ongoing COVID-​19 pandemic (Stephens-​Dougan 2021; Calvo and Ventura 2021; Allcott et al. 2020; Romer and Jamieson 2020; Guha-​Sapir and Checchi 2018; Malhotra and Kuo 2008).

Conclusion Who do voters think is responsible for policy successes and failures? This is a key question of comparative political science. Responsibility attribution is an integral part of the economic voting scholarship, which analyzes whether voters reward or punish incumbent politicians as the economy goes up or down (Lewis-​Beck and Paldam 2000). Asked of citizens in the Global South as well as in the Industrial North, the question seeks to assign political responsibility to decision-​makers in order to predict electoral outcomes (Ratto 2011). We believe political science needs to generate more disaster-​focused research and integrate it better to other areas of study within the discipline. With this chapter, we hoped to make the case for political science and especially its comparative field to mainstream the politics of climate disaster. As natural disasters increase in number and intensity across the world due to climate change, the question of who citizens believe is responsible for providing assistance in the aftermath becomes critical. We expect partisanship to be a major predictor of who gets blamed for poor relief interventions. We also expect biases of class, nationality, race, and gender to affect political responsibility and the related question of who voters believe “deserve” government assistance. Recent climate disasters and their contested aftermath confirm these expectations. Just in the United States, the catastrophic Katrina storm that flooded the city of New Orleans in 2005 and Hurricane Maria show how perceptions of the victims’ race or nationality can be quickly linked to expectations of government relief and responsibility. Similarly, given gendered perceptions of victimhood and vulnerability, we would like to see more gender-​focused studies of disaster politics (Skocpol 1995; Daby 2021). We believe that the comparative politics of climate disasters offer great potential for a broader comparative politics research agenda. Similar to comparative environmental politics, we expect disaster politics to differ under distinct government structures, such as federal or unitary, and political regimes, democratic or authoritarian (Hochstetler 2012;

138    Isabella Alcañiz and Ana Ivelisse Sanchez-Rivera Arceneaux and Stein 2006). As we discuss in our chapter, research on the politics of climate disasters reveals new connections between social inequality, partisanship, and ideology and the questions of government responsibility and support for welfare policies. Our study carries important implications for the design of climate disaster assistance in federal states. Examining how social inequality determines the effectiveness of government relief matters enormously for sound policy design. We hope our research on Puerto Rico will remind the reader that when natural disasters occur, people’s lives are severely disrupted and the difference between effective and ineffective government intervention may be measured tragically in lives lost.

Notes 1. Mariely López-​Santana, Washington Post, Monkey Cage, “A Controversial ‘Oversight Board’ Could Take Over Puerto Rico’s Hurricane Rebuilding Effort,” November 30, 2017. 2. See https://​hurac​anma​ria.eln​uevo​dia.com/​2017/​ 3. See https://​peri​odis​moin​vest​igat​ivo.com/​2018/​07/​pue​rto-​rico-​tuvo-​un-​brote-​de-​leptos​ piro​sis-​tras-​el-​hura​can-​maria-​pero-​el-​gobie​rno-​no-​lo-​dice/​ 4. The UMD Hispanic Survey was a probabilistic, national poll conducted by Nielson Scarborough between October and November of 2018. It polled 1,300 respondents in the continental United States, of whom 600 were Hispanic and 700 were Non-​Hispanic. 5. Dr. Ana Sanchez-​Rivera conducted face-​to-​face interviews as part of her dissertation research in the Loiza neighborhood of San Juan, capital of Puerto Rico. 6. See https://​www.cfr.org/​backg​roun​der/​pue​rto-​rico-​us-​territ​ory-​cri​sis 7. For a breakdown of FEMA’s main mission and eligibility criteria for disaster assistance, see https://​www.fema.gov/​what-​speci​fic-​items-​are-​cove​red-​hous​ing-​ass​ista​nce

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Chapter 8

Implementat i on of Internat i ona l Environm en ta l L aw A Comparative Perspective

Maria Ivanova, Natalia Escobar-​P emberthy, Anna Dubrova, and Candace Famiglietti International Environmental Law (IEL) is a fundamental governance instrument for the protection of the environment. It enables international cooperation to address global challenges such as pollution, biodiversity loss, climate change, and desertification, among others. Multilateral environmental agreements (MEAs), also known as global environmental conventions, are the core intergovernmental legal instruments designed to facilitate collective action for environmental protection. In doing so, their objective is to prevent and manage the harmful effects of human activities on human and planetary health (Gehring 2007; Mäler 1990; Mitchell 2003). These international instruments reflect collective intentionality, produce norms, enhance the capacity of governments to respond to environmental problems, and help coordinate national efforts (Abbott and Snidal 1998; Bodansky 2010; Choucri 1995; Simmons 2009). Through such processes, they transform “intergovernmental bargaining into deliberative transnational problem-​solving” (Gehring 2007, p. 496). Specifically, MEAs institute multiple obligations on states and provide key principles that guide the interactions among states and other actors around specific environmental issues (Birnie et al. 2009; Gehring 2007; Mäler 1990). They also establish institutional frameworks and facilitation mechanisms for participating states to receive the support they require to achieve the specific objectives defined for each environmental issue (Escobar-​Pemberthy 2018). They offer platforms to promote the participation of civil society and nongovernmental stakeholders in the processes of treaty-​ making, implementation, review, and monitoring (UNEP 2016; UNEP et al. 2007). Ultimately, these agreements seek “the control and prevention of environmental harm and the conservation and sustainable use of natural resources and ecosystems” (Birnie et al. 2009, p. 212). The results, however, differ across agreements and across jurisdictions. Some countries fulfill their obligations to a greater degree across agreements dealing with pollution, while

142    Maria Ivanova et al. others perform better in biodiversity-​related agreements. Some face challenges across most agreements. Why? What explains the variance in implementation? And what is necessary to improve it across the board? This chapter provides a comparative analysis of implementation of IEL. It offers an empirical assessment based on the Environmental Conventions Index (ECI) developed at the Center for Governance and Sustainability at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, and compares the extent to which 13 countries across all regions of the world (see Figure 8.1) implement environmental law in two broad clusters: pollution and conservation. The analysis establishes a baseline for assessing implementation of IEL and explaining the impact of national characteristics and circumstances on the fulfillment and effectiveness of international environmental agreements. We operate within the conceptual frameworks established within the IEL and global environmental politics (GEP) fields but, in this chapter, approach the issues from a comparative environmental politics viewpoint. The analytical lens, research inquiry, and methodology seek to explain why and how differences in national-​level capabilities influence performance on international commitments. By going beyond the traditional focus in IEL on ratification of multilateral agreements and, in GEP, on the negotiations and roles of different actors within environmental regimes, we identify and analyze national factors in the context of international environmental commitments. Connecting two levels of analysis—​national and international—​we ask how differences in national institutions, policies, legislation, and technical capacities explain differences in performance under international conventions.

Multilateral Environmental Agreements Multilateral environmental agreements (MEAs) date back to the end of nineteenth century and have proliferated since 1970. Scholars contend that there are currently more than 1,300 MEAs (Mitchell 2020). They can be classified according to a range of characteristics, including type and number of parties, the level of legality, and the instruments used to achieve their goals (Beyerlin and Marauhn 2011; Bodansky 2010). The most common classifications, however, are based on the geographical range of the environmental problems they address: global, regional, subregional, or bilateral (Beyerlin and Marauhn 2011); the nature of the obligations they enact, including regulations, procedures, or programs (Mitchell 2008); and the environmental issues they address (UNEP 2012). Agreements are often clustered based on the environmental issue within their purview, including atmosphere, biodiversity, chemicals and waste, land, and water. Table 8.1 presents the agreements in these issue areas that are truly global, meaning that they address an issue of global concern and are universal in membership (i.e., open to all countries). To deliver the results expected under IEL instruments, countries commit themselves to a long list of obligations which include establishing legislation, norms, and regulatory mechanisms; taking on financial and technical commitments; and committing to information gathering, reporting, and compliance. Implementation refers to the process by which countries establish national policies and undertake measures that enable them to deliver results on their international commitments. Implementation of these commitments is essential to improve the state of the environment. There are, however, critical challenges in terms of measuring the level of implementation. Particularly, a lack of empirical evidence

Implementation of International Environmental Law    143 Table 8.1 Multilateral Environmental Agreements of Global Character Year Signed

Parties (No.)

Atmosphere

• UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) • Vienna Convention and Montreal Protocol on the Ozone Layer

1992 1987

197 198

Biodiversity

• Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) • Convention on International Wetlands (Ramsar Convention) • Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) • Convention on the Conservation of Migratory Species (CMS)

1992 1971 1973 1979

196 171 183 132

Chemicals and Waste

• Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants • Basel Convention on Transboundary Movements of Hazardous Wastes • Rotterdam Convention on Prior Informed Consent Procedure

2001 1989 1998

184 188 164

Land

• UN Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD)

1994

197

Sources: (Basel Convention, 2019; CITES, 2016; CMS, 2021; Ozone Secretariat, 2019; Ramsar Secretariat, 2019; Rotterdam Convention, 2019; Secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity, 2018; Stockholm Convention, 2021; UNCCD, 2019; UNFCCC, 2015)

creates a need for metrics and assessments that enable comparison across countries and conventions. In addition, the analysis of implementation requires systematic approaches and explanations that go beyond the review of national environmental policies and address the existing linkages between those and the participation of the countries in the system of IEL. Debates about the fulfillment of international law tend to revolve around the concept of implementation, referring to the adoption of domestic measures to facilitate compliance (Jacobson and Brown-​Weiss 1995; Mitchell 2001; Simmons 1998; Young 1979). This requires changes in states’ behavior and the adoption of specific policies and measures at the national level to translate treaties into effective domestic laws (Chayes and Chayes 1993; Jacobson and Brown-​Weiss 1995; Mitchell 2001; Young 1979, 1994). Victor, Raustiala, and Skolnikoff (1998) are even more specific, referring to national implementation as the creation of new programs and the promulgation and enforcement of laws and standards. In some cases, however, states do not carry out these changes and behave contrary to expectations (Chayes and Chayes 1993, 1995; Downs et al. 1996; Simmons 1998). Nonetheless, implementation is “the central process to turn commitments into actions” (Victor et al. 1998) and deserves special attention. Previous scholarship has conceptualized the conflict of implementation and assessed its levels, but “very little empirical research (attempted) to answer these questions in a systematic way” (Jacobson and Brown-​Weiss 1995; Martin 2013). Furthermore, both scholars

144    Maria Ivanova et al. and policymakers assume that developing countries cannot make substantial behavioral changes to comply with the environmental agreements they have joined because of their limited capacity and resources. The lack of empirical evidence to support these claims constitutes a key gap in both the academic literature and in policy circles. As Steinberg and VanDeveer (2012) put it in the edited volume on comparative environmental politics (CEP), CEP allows for “conceptual tools that enable meaningful comparisons across borders,” allowing us “to gain insights into the cause-​and-​effect relationships that lead states and social actors to practice or ignore environmental stewardship” (Steinberg and VanDeveer 2012, p. 29). Additionally, they argue that it is important to “embrace ‘inside-​ out’ perspectives on the causal influence of international regimes” to better understand the impact of international institutions such as MEAs (Steinberg and VanDeveer 2012, p. 382). CEP is thus well-​equipped to study causal mechanisms and debunk common assumptions about the nature of relationships in global environmental governance. For example, the conventional assumption has been that environmental concerns have been more prevalent and had greater priority in wealthy countries of the Global North. However, several CEP social movement and public opinion studies demonstrate that citizens from countries in the Global South are also concerned about the environment, sometimes more so than those living in wealthy nations. For example, they are more willing to make economic sacrifices for environmental protection and support environmental movements (Dunlap and York 2012; O’Neill 2012). Similarly, our research shows that, in some cases, some developing countries outperform developed countries in implementing MEAs. Thus, a comparative approach of international law taking into account national realities and developments allows for a more nuanced picture and for more complex explanations.

Measuring Implementation of Multilateral Environmental Agreements To address the gap just outlined, the research team at the Center for Governance and Sustainability at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, has developed the Environmental Conventions Index (ECI), an implementation measurement tool that evaluates the extent to which countries are fulfilling their legal international environmental obligations. The ECI is based on time-​series, self-​reported data that allow for comparison across and within conventions over time. These data come from the national implementation reports that parties are obligated to submit to the secretariats according to the schedules established by each of the conventions.1 In this chapter, we compare the implementation of four of the conventions included in the ECI: the Basel Convention on the Transboundary Movement of Hazardous Waste, the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants, the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands, and the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES). The conventions require parties to report at different intervals. Reporting to the Basel Convention happens on an annual basis, while for the Stockholm Convention, reporting occurs every 4 years. The Ramsar Convention requires reports for the convening of the Conference of the Parties, approximately every 3 years. Notably, CITES requests parties

Implementation of International Environmental Law    145 to submit two reports: an annual report that includes information on trade in regulated species and a biennial report on implementation. The ECI uses the biennial implementation report since it corresponds with the purpose of the Index. Data derived from the national reports are coded according to a set of implementation variables based on the text of the conventions and are grouped under five categories of indicators: information, management, regulation, technical, and financial (see Box 8.1). Country responses on questions under each category are assigned a score on an ordinal scale from 0 to 5, with 5 being the highest level of implementation and 0 meaning no data provided. An index is then constructed for each country based on the scores for each indicator for the year of the respective national report (Escobar-​Pemberthy and Ivanova 2020). This framework reflects the specific policy changes that countries are expected to implement when joining an environmental convention. The indicators form the basis for the narrative analysis about the extent to which the countries in this comparative study implement the four global environmental agreements. To explain why, we have developed a typology of eight determining factors (see Table 8.2). We arrived at these factors through Box 8.1 Environmental Conventions Index Indicators • Information: Obligations to conduct scientific assessments, measurements, and evaluations associated with the activities connected to each convention; submission of reports to the conventions’ executive bodies; the establishment and maintenance of databases and records required for the implementation and operation of each convention. • Management: Designation or creation of administrative bodies and focal points to manage the implementation and general functioning of each convention; the linkages with the conventions’ executive bodies; the definition of strategic frameworks for the operation of each convention at the national level. • Regulation: Legislative and policy measures that each state party has to implement according to the framework of each convention. • Technical: Technical measures and procedures to address or manage the environmental problems associated with each environmental convention. • Financial: Payment of dues and assistance and other financial responsibilities by state parties.

Table 8.2 Determinants of the Implementation of International

Environmental Law Indicator

Determinants

Regulation

1. Existence of relevant legislation

Management

2 . Institutional arrangements, strategies, and policies 3. Cooperation and engagement

Informational

4 . Information, science, and monitoring practices 5. Public awareness

Technical

6. Technical measures 7. Exogenous factors

Financial

8. Availability of financial resources

146    Maria Ivanova et al. an extensive analytical process of policies, legislation, regulations, news reports, and nongovernmental organization (NGO) reports about the various conventions and countries. These entities can assist in identifying strengths and areas of improvement for the selected countries concerning their implementation of IEL. By identifying best practices, it is possible to identify and suggest areas where state parties can connect through assistance, knowledge exchange, and other capacity-​building mechanisms. Identifying challenges provides information on how specific factors can hinder the process of implementation as well as serve as a foundation for the development of targeted strategies to help countries’ address gaps in implementation and improve overall performance. In doing so, these variables provide a comparative perspective of implementation at the national level, illustrating how academic analysis can contribute to the development of policy mechanisms to improve the process of implementation. Thus, a comparative perspective allows policymakers at multiple levels to learn from and collaborate with others, working to create the conditions necessary to achieve global environmental goals. Otherwise, environmental treaties may be perceived as failed mechanisms, unable to fulfill the purposes for which they were created. In the following sections, we explore implementation of environmental agreements in a range of countries and examine the factors that enable implementation as well as remaining challenges. Importantly, four of the five categories of indicators measured by the ECI were included in the qualitative analysis since fulfillment of financial obligations is based solely on the availability of financial resources (Table 8.2). Hence, through the four ECI categories of indicators—​information, management, regulation, and technical capacity—​we compare the national measures in each of the countries and identify the policy arrangements that contribute to the implementation of IEL.

Comparing Environmental Law Implementation Across Countries IEL is of little significance if not translated into national practice. Understanding the extent to which countries implement the provisions of IEL and their commitments is critical to assessing progress and identifying measures to facilitate the achievement of the goals of the conventions (Beyerlin and Marauhn 2011; Kurukulasuriya and Robinson 2006). At the national level, the process of implementation faces multiple challenges, including the existence of multiple environmental commitments at the country level and lack of capacity to address the multidimensional nature of environmental threats. In this context, a comparative analysis of implementation can highlight the range of factors that hinder or help implementation and facilitate learning about the mechanisms and techniques that countries put into place to deliver on the provisions of each convention (Beyerlin and Marauhn 2011; Sands 2003). The comparative analysis in this chapter seeks to illustrate the differences among countries in the implementation of IEL and explain the reasons behind it. The expectation is that implementation will differ across countries based on their level of development. The empirical qualitative analysis of 13 countries2 from each region of the world shows somewhat

Implementation of International Environmental Law    147

Countries in comparative analysis

Created with mapchart.net

Figure 8.1  Countries selected for comparative analysis. different results. In this chapter, we illustrate the results and begin to explore possible explanations. The 13 countries—​Algeria, Argentina, Australia, Canada, Colombia, Czechia, Germany, Mozambique, Rwanda, South Korea, Thailand, the Gambia, and Viet Nam—​were chosen based on criteria of membership in global environmental conventions, availability of information, equitable representation of developed and developing countries, and distribution among the five UN geographic regions. (see Figure 8.1. Importantly, these countries show varying results on implementation of key global environmental agreements in conservation and pollution (see Figure 8.2). In this chapter, we describe how they differ and explain why. Implementation of environmental agreements differs considerably across the 13 countries. Importantly, however, no country shows consistently high (or consistently low) performance across all analyzed conventions (Figure 8.2). The only country that comes close to consistency in performance is Rwanda even though it has not reported to CITES, so it is not possible to assess implementation of this convention. Notably, the highest performer on the Basel convention in the group, and indeed in the world, is Argentina. Similarly, Algeria, also a developing country, performs at the same level as Czechia and Germany. Conversely, for the Stockholm Convention, which is much more technical in nature than the Basel convention, a country’s level of development corresponds more closely to higher levels of implementation. As Figure 8.2 demonstrates, there is a clear gap in performance on the Stockholm Convention between two groups of developed (Australia, Canada, Czechia, Germany, and South Korea) and developing countries (Algeria, Argentina, Colombia, Mozambique, Rwanda, Thailand, the Gambia, and Viet Nam). In CITES, however, the situation is very different—​ most developed countries (except for Germany) are lagging. Importantly, CITES has the lowest level of reporting among all the conventions evaluated, and 3 of the 13 countries—​Algeria, the Gambia, and Rwanda—​have never submitted a biennial report, hence providing no data for calculation of the Index. Further analysis of implementation

148    Maria Ivanova et al. 5 4.5

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Figure 8.2  Environmental Conventions Index (ECI) scores for 13 selected countries. Note: CITES scores for Rwanda, Algeria, and the Gambia are not calculated since these countries have not submitted a report.

in these 13 countries is presented in the following section, which provides a comparative perspective of key drivers behind implementation. Results for each of the four categories of indicators supplement the qualitative analysis and provide a more nuanced picture of national implementation.

Explaining Environmental Law Implementation Across Countries Existing analyses of IEL implementation focus on specific countries or variables (Brown-​ Weiss and Jacobson 1998; Mauerhofer et al. 2015; Mitchell 2001; Oeter 1997; Shihata 1996). The ECI, on the other hand, provides data for all member states (if they have submitted national reports) to four conventions in two major clusters (biodiversity and chemicals and waste). The time series data from this empirical instrument demonstrate that the implementation of IEL varies across countries and conventions; indeed there is no one country that performs equally well across all conventions (Escobar-​Pemberthy and Ivanova 2020). While some countries perform similarly across all the conventions, others register different degrees of implementation among or within clusters, and the data from the 13 selected countries illustrate this dynamic. Examining the policies and measures that countries put in place and the challenges they face brings out key insights and lessons learned. We explore these factors further as they pertain to regulation, management, information, and technical capacity.

Implementation of International Environmental Law    149

Regulation: Legislation Enactment and Enforcement Enactment of national legislation for addressing the concerns subject to international environmental agreements is the foundational element for successful implementation of IEL. This is particularly true for the Basel Convention and CITES because the adoption of domestic laws is critical for defining and managing categories of hazardous wastes and procedures for trade in endangered species. Evidence from this comparative analysis shows that all 13 countries have delivered to some extent in this regard, with very few exceptions (Figure 8.3). The countries in this analysis perform better in the chemicals and waste cluster—​especially notable is their performance under the Basel Convention, where 11 of the 13 countries have a perfect score of 5. Similarly, for the Stockholm Convention, 10 countries scored a 4 or better, which indicates good progress in establishing relevant legislation. Most cases where countries have not met the obligation to establish legislation relate to one of the biodiversity conventions, CITES or Ramsar. Only two countries (Czechia and Germany) struggle with establishing proper legislation in both. Interestingly, only one country, Thailand, shows a high level of performance (score over 4) in all four conventions. The other 12 countries struggled in at least one MEA, which suggests that improving synergies among conventions at the national level may also help improve implementation. Countries’ approaches to regulation differ. Some establish specific laws for the respective components of each convention. Algeria, Argentina, the Gambia, and Germany, for example, established specific laws to regulate the transportation and management of wastes and the management of persistent organic pollutants (POPs), thus fulfilling their obligations to the Basel and Stockholm conventions (Basel Convention 2008a, 2011b; Government of Argentina 2007; REVADE 2016). Other countries take a broader approach, situating the environment under guiding national frameworks. For example, Colombia’s

5.00 4.50

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4.00 3.50 3.00 2.50 2.00 1.50

Ramsar

Figure 8.3  Regulation indicator scores for 13 selected countries.

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150    Maria Ivanova et al. approach emanates from the country’s 1991 national constitution, which sets forth new laws and principles for the balance between environment and national development (O’Brien 1995). Rwanda also has developed comprehensive legislation for environmental protection and robust policies linking development and environment, as well as a regulatory framework that includes presidential decrees and ministerial orders. Several approaches can be found in the case of legislation for the protection of biodiversity. Some countries connect the overall protection of biodiversity with other policy issues—​some environmental, and others such as trade, health, and the fight against crime. For example, the national legislation for CITES links biodiversity to international trade and criminal law, while the one for Ramsar links it to land management and development. In other cases, biodiversity conservation is presented as a comprehensive piece of legislation covering multiple issues under the same laws, as is the case for Australia and Thailand (Farrier and Tucker 2000). Other countries adopt more targeted approaches to ensure effective implementation. Czechia and Germany, for example, have specific national and federal regulations that cover specific species requiring protection. South Korea uses an even more granular approach, establishing specific pieces of legislation for each of their objectives under specific environmental agreements. For example, the country amended its Pharmaceutical Affairs Act to include regulation of the import and export of drugs made from processed goods of animals and plants as prescribed by CITES (Ministry of Food and Drug Safety 2016). In a similar approach, Czechia has connected the protection of wetlands to its water management policies to promote the wise use of water resources and return water to key environmental assets, including the designated Ramsar wetland sites (Ramsar 2012). Still, enacting and enforcing such regulation presents important challenges. Countries struggle, for example, with the need to continuously update or add elements to existing legislation to address amendments and add new listings under the Basel and Stockholm Conventions. This fragmentation impacts implementation by slowing it down and often adding confusion. In addition, coordination among government agencies for planning, executing, monitoring, and reporting on the multiple pieces of legislation requires significant time and resources.

Management: Institutions, Strategies, and Engagement Management obligations are at the core of national processes to domesticate global environmental obligations because they encompass the creation and functioning of relevant institutions. These obligations pertain to the designation or creation of administrative bodies and focal points to manage the implementation and general operations of each convention. This also includes the linkages with the conventions’ executive bodies and the definition of strategic frameworks for the operation of each convention at the national level. Implementing these measures involves various activities that can be grouped under two streams: institutional arrangements, strategies, and policies; and cooperation and engagement. The appointment of institutions to serve as focal points and authorities and to work on implementation of each of the agreements is critical. These authorities are responsible for the design of strategies and policies and the establishment of intra-​agency cooperation

Implementation of International Environmental Law    151 5.00 4.50

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Figure 8.4  Management indicator scores for 13 selected countries. mechanisms. In addition, cooperation with other actors involved in the process of implementation is required at both national and international levels. Mechanisms for productive engagement include networks and partnerships with NGOs and academic institutions as well as bilateral and regional agreements and initiatives on the intergovernmental level. Figure 8.4 illustrates the results in this category of obligations for the 13 countries, indicating a significant gap between chemicals and waste and biodiversity conventions for almost every country. Performance on the pollution conventions in terms of management is significantly higher than for the conservation conventions. Establishment of national institutions is a basic obligation for implementation. In most cases, an array of institutions needs to be created or designated to meet the requirement of the convention. Algeria, for example, established the National Observatory for Environment and Sustainable Development, the National Centre for Environmental Training, and the National Waste Agency to work on the implementation of the chemicals conventions (Ministry of Land Planning and the Environment 2010). Australia has the Stockholm Intergovernmental Forum and the National Measurement Institute to work on the management and assessment of POPs and hazardous substances (Department of the Environment and Heritage 2006). In some cases, similar to legislation, countries create linkages between the institutional arrangements for the chemicals and waste conventions with health and safety. In Germany, for example, the Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety works closely with the Federal Institute for Occupational Safety to monitor POPs (Federal Republic of Germany 2006). In South Korea, the National Institute of Environmental Research, the Korea Environment Institute, the Korea Environmental Management Corporation, and the Korea Environment Resources Corporation work together on the management and regulation of transboundary movement of hazardous waste (Basel Convention 2008b). Such partnerships with other institutions for data collection and analysis are an important best practice.

152    Maria Ivanova et al. Partners also support other processes with technical assistance for training and implementation. In Thailand, for example, the Environmental Research Institute of Chulalongkorn University supports the implementation of the Basel Convention, while the Pollution Control Departments serves as the Focal Point for the Stockholm Convention (Basel Convention 2011c; Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment [MNRE] 2007). However, as countries deal with multiple levels of governance and institutions working on the process of implementation, coordination among them becomes a critical factor for achieving the policy goals established by each convention. An example of success in this area comes from Colombia, where the national government has developed a high degree of coordination among several ministries involved in the management of POPs, including regional autonomous corporations (Ministerio de Ambiente Vivienda y Desarrollo Territorial 2010). In defining policies and strategies, the most successful approaches are based on creating cross-​cutting policies and agendas that cover a broad array of issues instead of targeting specific conventions. For example, Czechia in its State Environmental Policy 2012–​2020 underlines the importance of implementing provisions of MEAs like the Basel and Stockholm Conventions that aim to protect human and environmental health from the harmful effects of chemical substances (Ministry of the Environment [Ministerstvo životního prostředí] 2013). Algeria’s strategies also reflect important connections among policy areas. For example, the management of chemicals, wastes, and POPs is based on its National Environmental Strategy (NES) and the National Environmental Action Plan and Sustainable Development (NEAPSD) (Ministry of Land Planning and the Environment 2010). In a similar approach, Rwanda has managed to incorporate poverty reduction and stakeholders’ engagement as two of the core components of its strategy to combat illegal wildlife trade. Acknowledging the linkages between poverty and illegal wildlife trade, Rwanda has created programs to prevent poaching, hunting, and habitat loss by rehabilitating and employing ex-​poachers. While creating broad strategies and policies has been useful in these examples to garner attention and action around specific environmental issues, the remaining challenge is creating synergies across the global conventions and thematic clusters. Cooperation is the second determinant of successful management. It encompasses efforts of national governments to collaborate at various levels with convention secretariats to other countries and non-​state actors at global and national levels. Cooperation is not the same as coordination. Coordination happens on the intrastate level, within the government itself and across its various agencies and institutions. Cooperation, on the other hand, happens at the interstate level (with other states) or with non-​state actors. Cooperation implies deeper engagement, different relationship characteristics, and power balance. An important best practice is the establishment of regional centers under the chemicals conventions which serve as capacity-​building institutions for subregions and provide country support, although the hosting country is often the greatest benefactor. For example, Argentina is the only country included in this analysis that hosts a regional center for the Basel Convention. It is also the only country to have a perfect score of 5, outperforming all developing countries included herein. Czechia hosts a Stockholm Convention regional center and shows higher levels of implementation than its peers and is the highest among the 13 analyzed countries. In some cases, however, regional centers do not perform according to expectations and hence do not always contribute to successful MEA implementation. One example is the Regional Center for the Stockholm Convention in Algeria. It is hindered by

Implementation of International Environmental Law    153 low funding and unable to deliver capacity-​building activities to the countries in the region, according to a 2013–​2014 performance assessment (Stockholm Convention 2015). In addition to regional centers, countries also establish various mechanisms to cooperate with peers, either by providing financial support (often the case for developed countries) or by joining efforts in tackling transboundary issues via joint policies and other mechanisms (successfully utilized by both developed and developing countries). Canada is a good example of the former, providing support and financial assistance to UNEP, the convention secretariats, and other national governments (UNEP 2000). In 2000, Canada established the 5-​year $20 million Canada POPs Fund that was later extended until 2010, administered by the World Bank, to assist developing countries and countries with economies in transition in building their capacities to deal with POPs and in implementing their obligations under the convention (Government of Canada 2020). When joining efforts to tackle issues covered by the conventions, countries can often act bilaterally. Examples of bilateral cooperation include the 1986 Canada–​US agreement on the transboundary movement of hazardous wastes that connects to the implementation of Basel Convention and Germany–​ Netherlands activities in practicing cross-​boundary nature conservation (de Jong and van Tatenhove 1998). At the regional level, multilateral cooperation has led some countries to assume a position of leadership, helping and supporting the implementation of the agreements in other countries. South Korea, for example, has promoted a database of POPs monitoring results from each country in East Asia, as well as data sharing and data exchange with international organizations (Ministry of Environment 2013). Regional organizations such as the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) also serve as platforms for cooperation. In December 2005, at a Special Meeting of ASEAN, the Ministers responsible for CITES implementation established a regional action plan to create a regional intergovernmental law enforcement network for illegal wildlife trade as well as a mechanism to share information and promote collaboration among countries and government agencies (Oswell 2010). In Africa, regional multilateral agreements are important mechanisms for cooperation and implementation, including the Lusaka Agreement on Cooperative Enforcement Operations Directed at Illegal Trade in Wild Fauna and Flora in Africa and the Agreement on the Ban of the Import into Africa and the Control of Transboundary Movement and Management of Hazardous Wastes (Bamako Convention). Twenty-​five African countries are parties to the regional multilateral Bamako Convention, while the Lusaka Agreement has 7 members and 10 signatories. The Bamako Convention, which came into force in 1996, prohibits the import of all hazardous wastes, including radioactive waste, into African countries. The agreement imposes stricter regulation than the Basel Convention since it prohibits all imports of hazardous wastes and provides no exemption for radioactive wastes. Rwanda offers another example of regional cooperation, as the country aims to become a regional hub for capacity building and experience sharing among East African countries. At the national level, cooperation with stakeholders is also an important element in ensuring MEA implementation and meeting management obligations. Countries engage with non-​state actors to develop specific projects and activities that support implementation. Non-​state actors like community organizations, industry conglomerates, and NGOs support and create plans and projects to advance environmental goals at the local level. For example, the NGO Green Innovation and Development (GreenID) in Viet Nam has been instrumental in raising public awareness about air pollution and climate change through

154    Maria Ivanova et al. research, regional and community initiatives, and monitoring air quality. The Vietnamese government adopted the organization’s recommendations on renewable energy and incorporated them into their Renewable Energy Development Strategy 2016–​2030. Another example of such cooperation includes the work by Argentinean state, municipal, and local governments on the adoption of specific waste management goals and plans (International POPs Elimination Network 2010). As demonstrated by GreenID, NGOs serve an important role in raising public awareness. In Argentina, NGOs actively engage in raising awareness of POPs. Likewise, in Viet Nam, environmental NGOs like CHANGE Viet Nam and Save Viet Nam’s Wildlife have contributed to demand reduction of endangered species through targeted campaigns in end-​user communities (also see Nillasithanukroh et al., this Handbook). Save Viet Nam’s Wildlife has also been instrumental in providing training to CITES officials and promoting cooperation (locally, nationally, and regionally) with researchers, conservationists, and authorities to enhance conservation efforts for pangolin, elephant, rhino, reptile, small primate, and carnivore species. NGOs also engage in agenda-​setting and forming institutional arrangements. In Czechia, the Arnika Association, a national NGO, has served as a coordination center for Central and Eastern Europe on the right to a healthy environment since 2008. Some countries, such as Thailand, have actively promoted the participation of civil society organizations in the implementation of the conventions. The Thai National Master Plan on Waste Management (2016–​2021) supports all relevant sectors for participation in the management of solid and hazardous wastes, and the government has also hosted workshops to foster communication and collaboration among organizations in fulfilling the goals of environmentally sound management of POPs. The government of Rwanda leads community-​based planning projects for the protection of wetlands. All these institutional arrangements are critical to fulfilling related management obligations, particularly around capacity building and training mechanisms essential to achieving the goals of environmental conventions.

Information: Data Collection, Scientific Assessment, and Reporting Information availability is fundamental to the implementation of IEL for two reasons that each requires a separate set of activities. First, data collection is essential to monitoring the state of the environment and establishing baselines for future reference. It is also important in assessing progress in fulfilling obligations and producing the reports that constitute the most important evidence of how countries are advancing in implementing the conventions. Second, the availability of information supports public awareness raising and stakeholder engagement, which are important in developing policies to achieve each agreement’s objectives. Ultimately, information, science, and monitoring constitute essential inputs to the policy-​ making process. Different conventions, however, require different levels of action on information. The Basel Convention, for example, has only one requirement: the establishment of indicators related to the effect of hazardous waste on human health and the environment. Hence, as Figure 8.5 illustrates, countries either have a perfect score of 5 or a minimal score

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Ramsar

Figure 8.5  Information indicator scores for 13 selected countries. of 1 in those cases where such indicators are yet to be developed. Other conventions have a more robust set of requirements. Implementation of information-​related obligations is generally high for the Ramsar and Stockholm Conventions and lower for CITES. Possible explanations for these lower scores include the sheer extent of the information required (CITES regulates more than 30,000 species of fauna and flora) and the lack of reporting. Best practices in monitoring and data collection and sharing take multiple forms. For the Ramsar Convention, monitoring is critical for the mapping and assessment of protected wetland sites. Algeria developed a partnership between the General Directorate of Forests and the Mediterranean Wetlands Observatory to produce thematic maps on land use and flooding dynamics of the country’s Ramsar sites (Guelmami 2016). In Canada, some of the country’s main assets in the implementation of the Ramsar Convention are the data and information management systems (Fournier et al. 2007). In South Korea, surveys were critical once the country joined the Ramsar Convention in 1997 as well (Kim 2010). Both surveys supported the designation of Ramsar sites. Data are not only important for designating Ramsar sites but also for maintaining them and evaluating whether they are fulfilling the various requirements established by the convention. Argentina, for example, despite overall low levels of Ramsar implementation, has made consistent and important progress in implementing the information-​related obligations established by the convention. In Czechia, research is used to improve knowledge among government and civil leaders about the management and multipurpose use of wetland reservoirs (Petřík et al. 2007). Managing POPs also requires information and monitoring. Countries need to collect data on the substances present in humans and the environment. One country that has made important progress is Czechia. The country established a national database for records on hazardous substances and an information system for contaminated sites, old environmental burdens, exposure monitoring, and the contamination of the environment and human matrices (Arnika Association 2006; Klánová et al. 2009; RECETOX 2017). Using a similar approach, Thailand focuses research on the creation of a POPs inventory to evaluate

156    Maria Ivanova et al. the existence of stockpiles of some pollutants, particularly pesticides (Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment [MNRE] 2007). South Korea uses data collection, scientific assessment, and monitoring in a combined effort to strengthen implementation of the Stockholm Convention. Each of the ministries engaged in the reduction and eradication of POPs has a subsidiary research institute that studies the presence of these substances in fish, food products, human breastmilk, and human blood (Government of the Republic of Korea 2009). Similar to the management indicator, public awareness, education, and communication strategies are also necessary to fulfill the information obligations under the environmental conventions. In the case of the Ramsar Convention, countries carry out different activities related to information dissemination. Algeria facilitates public awareness by distributing materials for events including World Wetlands Day, World Tree Day, and Environment Day (Gardner et al. 2009). Colombia has also developed informative campaigns and education projects to teach children and communities about local wetland preservation (Ramsar Secretariat and Ruiz-​Carvajal 2006). The Thailand Biodiversity Division, under the Office of Natural Resources and Environmental Policy and Planning, along with WWF Thailand, has promoted public awareness of wetlands since 2002, especially regarding the national parks system. Australia developed a similar educational approach in which the government established Wetland Environment Centres in various regions to provide public education about specific Ramsar sites and wetlands protection in general. These Centres also serve to promote cooperation with NGOs involved in wetlands management (Brisbane City Council 2016; Department of the Environment 2016). All these activities are coordinated with the Ramsar Secretariat as part of the convention’s Communication, Education, Participation, and Awareness Programme (CEPA), which started in 1999. Germany also promotes public awareness and data and information availability regarding endangered species, both nationally and as part of global biodiversity conservation initiatives (CITES 2013), which demonstrates the importance and value of data in tackling environmental problems. In a similar approach, South Korea has initiated public awareness on biodiversity by launching a Natural History Research Information Center to combine biodiversity databases from other national sources such as natural history museums as well as molecular and genomic databases that support biodiversity conservation efforts (Korea Natural History Research Information Center 2017). Viet Nam has also implemented an important program of environmental information mainstreaming that has resulted in high levels of biodiversity public awareness. For instance, the Biodiversity Barometer in 2015 ranked Viet Nam among the highest in the world, with 94% of citizens reporting having heard the term “biodiversity” in comparison to only 55% of Americans. Chemicals management and waste disposal also require public awareness. Countries such as Argentina have developed a series of activities including workshops, conferences on POPs, and media campaigns to involve communities in the implementation of the Stockholm Convention (Bianco and Campra 2005; Government of Argentina 2007). One of the main goals of these strategies is to produce a publicly available, valid inventory of the sources of polluting substances and an inventory of contaminated sites. Australia has also established a consultation with NGOs dealing with POPs, the Stockholm Reference Group (SRG) (Government of Australia and Department of the Environment and Heritage 2006). Germany has developed eco-​labeling programs that comprise more than a hundred

Implementation of International Environmental Law    157 product categories (e.g., tires, copiers, paper), about 1,500 companies, and more than 12,000 labeled products (Blue Angel 2017).

Technical: Capacity and Measures for Problem-​Solving Implementing environmental conventions requires setting up technical measures to control the environmental problems addressed by each agreement. Aspects such as reducing the generation of hazardous waste, permitting for the trade of endangered species, physically protecting wetlands, and controlling stockpiles of pollutant substances are examples of technical obligations. In addition, countries need to address technical challenges generated by other policies put into place that negatively impact the control of hazardous substances or the protection of biodiversity. In most cases, these exogenous factors result from the consequences of other human activities. Since technical obligations are particularly encompassing and their fulfillment relies heavily on exogenous factors, countries’ overall performance is the lowest among the indicators, and fewer patterns can be observed. Not a single country performs consistently across all four MEAs, and results are sporadic, failing to exhibit any significant clustering among biodiversity or chemicals and waste conventions (Figure 8.6). Some countries have developed best practices for putting technical measures in place. Algeria, for example, has defined specific policies to address the negative impact of land-​use activities on different ecosystems. As acknowledged by Algeria’s Forest Department, which serves as the country’s Ramsar administrative authority, “Algeria’s key environment issues include the depletion of water resources, land degradation and desertification, overuse of forest resources and decrease in species populations” (Gardner et al. 2009; Ramsar Secretariat 2017). To minimize the negative effects of these factors on wetlands, the country 5.00 4.50

ECI Scores

4.00 3.50 3.00 2.50

CITES

Ramsar

Figure 8.6  Technical indicator scores for 13 selected countries.

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158    Maria Ivanova et al. had to design policies to technically address those issues. Canada faces similar challenges regarding land use. It set up reverse auctions to incentivize wetlands conservation and restoration on agricultural land (Molnar and Kubiszewski 2012). Canada has also established several water pollution trading schemes as another mechanism to protect wetlands. In Czechia, technical measures to protect wetlands include specific recognition of ecological changes in some Ramsar sites. Specifically, sites are threatened by the need to develop adequate plans for the technical and sound management of the fishponds, balancing current levels of protection with anthropogenic interference (Harmáčková and Vačkář 2015). Other innovative initiatives include South Korea’s program to design technical measures to solve multiple environmental problems at once. Wetland management programs, for example, also aim to improve the protection of migratory bird species (Korea National Park Services 2009). A similar approach has been developed in Argentina, where wetland conservation policies define long-​term plans that include the conservation of endangered bird species protected, in some cases, by CITES. Management of POPs requires highly technical procedures, ranging from certificates that confirm the sound management of waste from cradle to grave (originally designed in Argentina) (Basel Convention 2011a) to policies preventing new sources of POPs (Bianco and Campra 2005). Germany has also worked on measures and technologies for the proper disposal of waste and to prohibit the production, sale, and use of banned substances such as DDT (Federal Republic of Germany 2006). Policies are also focused on the management of raw materials efficiency projects along the entire production value chain (German Council for Sustainable Development [RNE] 2017). Rwanda is one of the pioneers in sound chemicals management, with measures such as the 2008 ban on the manufacture, use, importation, and sale of plastic bags. Strict enforcement of the law, along with incentives for substitution, has led to dramatic positive results in reducing plastic pollution. In some cases, technical measures are developed through specialized organizations. Canada, for example, created the Habitat Stewardship Program for Species at Risk, one of three pillars in Canada’s national strategy to protect species at risk. Canada strengthened the program in 2014, by allocating funding to protect nonendangered species as well (Environment and Climate Change Canada 2017). However, external factors continue to impact the technical components of environmental conventions. In South Korea, technical measures have not been sufficient to control the trade and farming of some species such as moon bears due to local beliefs about their medicinal properties and monetary value. Since 2010, the National Assembly has been considering a law that will prohibit the further breeding and sale of bears. Similarly, measures to control turtle hunting in Colombia have not been effective because of their religious value (TRAFFIC 2016).

Conclusion: Overall Lessons for Cooperation and Implementation Analyzing the implementation of IEL for managing chemicals and protecting biodiversity reflects the diverse realities and processes of countries and agreements. National policies and strategies, regional cooperation, data collection and information systems, and managerial

Implementation of International Environmental Law    159 approaches are important areas in which countries approach implementation differently. The comparative analysis based on the indicators identified by the ECI—​regulation, management, information, and technical capacity—​shows that even though there is still room for progress, countries are achieving important results. The analysis of the 13 qualitative national implementation profiles presented in this chapter confirms that, from a comparative perspective, the process of implementation is intrinsically connected with the measures that countries establish to fulfill the obligations they acquire when joining conventions. These measures vary across countries and conventions because every state operates within existing social and political structures. Ultimately, by understanding best practices and challenges, actors can improve performance and contribute to fulfilling the goals of the environmental agreements. ECI results and the findings of the qualitative data analysis indicate important best practices among developing countries that clearly demonstrate the importance and relevance of institutional arrangements. In the case of Rwanda, for example, environmental protection measures align international, national, and subnational policies as well as economic development and environmental sustainability. The high level of implementation that this country demonstrates as a result of these actions connects to a variety of studies that note the importance of environmental mainstreaming for the improvement of regulatory capacity (Meadowcroft 2012; Steinberg 2012). Rwanda’s integrated approach to resource management informs environmental and development strategies and reflects an awareness of the need for holistic, systemic governance. This positions Rwanda as a regional leader in the area of IEL implementation and indicates an opportunity for South–​South learning and technical cooperation in Africa and globally. Similarly, other developing countries that perform exceptionally well, such as, for example, Viet Nam in both CITES and Ramsar, have the potential to become leaders in their respective regions and become capacity-​building hubs. Using the ECI as a baseline for implementation provides various opportunities for further research and comparative analysis. Our findings indicate that developing countries indeed struggle with implementation more than do developed countries—​but only in the pollution cluster and primarily when it comes to fulfilling technical obligations. Importantly, Rwanda and Viet Nam—​with political systems that cannot be characterized as traditional democracies—​perform on par with developed countries in meeting these types of obligations. These states were able to establish and support the necessary institutions and legislation, contesting the traditional notion that “liberal democracy may be at least a necessary condition for environmental protection” (Hochstetler 2012, p. 222). Further comparative analysis is needed and more non-​democracies would need to be analyzed to ascertain whether Rwanda and Viet Nam are outliers or whether liberal democracy might not actually be a necessary condition for successful implementation of MEAs. Importantly, IEL implementation should not be a goal on its own, and the link between implementation and effectiveness demands further analysis to achieve positive social and environmental outcomes. Various environmental data are required to connect the articulation of national policies with the effectiveness of the conventions. Using specific indicators that measure the degree of pollution control and biodiversity conservation, a comparison of IEL implementation can inform whether and to what extent environmental agreements are contributing to the resolution of environmental problems. This indicates a promising area for future academic research, one that would require transdisciplinary approaches building on multiple fields and bringing together social sciences and environmental science.

160    Maria Ivanova et al.

Notes 1. For a detailed overview and explanation of the full methodology of the ECI, see Escobar-​ Pemberthy and Ivanova, “Implementation of Multilateral Environmental Agreements: Rationale and Design of the Environmental Conventions Index.” Sustainability 12 (2020), 7098. https://​doi.org/​10.3390/​su1​2177​098 2. The authors are part of a team at the Center for Governance and Sustainability at UMass Boston that has partnered with the Law Division of UNEP in the development of projects on the implementation of International Environmental Law. The data and results from those projects inform the empirical research presented in this chapter.

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Implementation of International Environmental Law    165 UNEP. Role of Multilateral Environmental Agreements (MEAs) in Achieving the Sustainable Development Goals. Nairobi: United Nations, 2016. http://​www.unep.org/​envi​ronm​enta​ lgov​erna​nce/​Port​als/​8/​publi​cati​ons/​role-​mea-​synerg​ies-​sdgs.pdf. UNEP, University of Joensuu, and Government of Canada. Multilateral Environmental Agreement Negotiator’s Handbook. Joensuu, Finland: University of Joensuu, 2007. UNFCCC. “Status of Ratification of the Convention.” 2015. http://​unf​ccc.int/​essen​tial​_​bac​ kgro​und/​con​vent​ion/​sta​tus_​of_​r​atif​i cat​ion/​items/​2631.php Victor, D. G., K. Raustiala, and E. B. Skolnikoff. The Implementation and Effectiveness of International Environmental Commitments: Theory and Practice. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998. Young, Oran R. Compliance and Public Authority: A Theory with International Applications. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979. Young, Oran R. International Governance: Protecting the Environment in a Stateless Society. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994.

Chapter 9

C ompar at i v e In ternationa l Fi sh e ri e s M anage me nt Elizabeth R. DeSombre The management of ocean fisheries is difficult. Fisheries are declining at dramatic rates. The percentage of marine fish stocks estimated to be fished within sustainable levels decreased from 90% in 1974 to 65.8% in 2017; many of those deemed technically sustainable are unable to withstand any increase in fishing pressure (FAO 2020b). Populations of high-​value predatory fish (like tuna and swordfish) have populations at only 10% of their preindustrial exploitation levels (Myers and Worm 2003). One especially alarmist study predicted that global ocean fisheries will collapse by 2048 (Worm et al. 2006). Many of the most valued fish species spend much of their time in the high seas, areas not under the control of states. Other species transit across the exclusive economic zones (EEZs) of different states, or between EEZs and the high seas. Protecting or regulating fisheries thus requires cooperation of states. Uncertainty about stock health and level of sustainable fishing intersects with two-​level negotiation games (Putnam 1988) in which states trade off short-​term domestic interests with long-​term management goals and concerns about what other states will be willing to agree to or implement. To make matters more complicated, ocean fisheries are not under the management of one central international organization, but instead are managed by separate regional fisheries management organizations (RFMOs), individually negotiated international agreements focused on a region, a species, or some combination of the two. Depending on how you count, there are currently approximately 20 RFMOs that have management jurisdiction over high-​ seas fisheries. (Far more are involved in elements of scientific research and exchange of information but do not actually create rules for protecting fish stocks.) These agreements range from the small and specialized—​the six-​member Commission for the Conservation and Management of Pollock Resources in the Central Bering Sea (CCBSP) or the International Pacific Halibut Commission (IPHC), which involves only the United States and Canada—​ to the 24-​member General Fisheries Commission for the Mediterranean (GFCM), which addresses fishing for the variety of species within the Mediterranean Ocean. The five tuna RFMOs have responsibility for 91% of the ocean across their management areas (Pew 2012).

Comparative International Fisheries Management    167

Figure 9.1  Map of regional fisheries bodies. Source: FAO (2017).

States are frequently members of many different RFMOs, representing the areas where their vessels fish (Figure 9.1). Each RFMO manages the stocks it oversees through slightly different processes, with different sets of actors and different levels of success. This chapter examines the intersection of institutional design, interests of states, and global markets for fisheries products to suggest elements that contribute to better or worse fisheries management within RFMOs. The chapter also examines the evolution of these organizations as they have worked to collaborate and learn from each other.

Regional Fisheries Management Organizations: Overview Each RFMO has been separately negotiated and operates independently. Nevertheless, some common elements can be discerned. Most have some kind of scientific body as part of the organizational structure. The organizations tend to regulate via a two-​stage process, in which the scientific committee makes recommendations about the health of the species that the organization oversees and about the level or type of fishing sustainable for the long-​term health of the fish stocks. Actual binding obligations are then made via a political process that involves decisions taken by a regulatory commission made up of all member states, each of which has an equal vote in the outcome. The most common regulatory approach is to restrict catches. In those cases the Commission decides both on a total allowable catch (TAC) for the entire fishery and then usually divides it among the member states, so that each state has a specific quota (usually

168   Elizabeth R. DeSombre expressed in weight) for a given year. In other approaches, most of these more recent, the Commission instead restricts some form of fishing effort, such as limiting the number or type of vessels a state can have in the management area or the number of days that they can fish. Either approach may also involve other fishing restrictions as well, prohibiting certain types of fishing gear or requiring minimum catch sizes for fish to ensure that they are able to reach reproductive maturity before they are caught. In recent times, RFMOs have also worked on issues of bycatch—​fish or non-​fish species caught incidentally when other fish species are targeted—​and some have begun to examine the implications of climate change for the fisheries they manage. RFMOs have faced many difficulties in their efforts to manage fisheries. These include the ability of states—​and ships—​to choose not to be bound by RFMO rules, the ease of noncompliance in the specific context of fisheries management, and the complexities that arise from multiple organizations managing regionally when fishing vessels are able to move—​ and markets operate—​globally. First, states can opt out of the regulatory process. International environmental law cannot bind states without their consent. States may choose not to join fisheries agreements, and their ships are not bound by its provisions or by the decisions of RFMO regulatory bodies in which they are not members. Not joining an RFMO where your ships fish is one way to opt out of the process, and historically there have been some traditional fishing states that failed to join the relevant RFMOs for their fishing efforts. The United States, for example, only became member of the Northwest Atlantic Fisheries Organization (NAFO), which was founded in 1979, in 1995, despite the fact that its vessels were fishing in the area. Panama, Chile, Mexico, and Venezuela were also regularly fishing in the NAFO regulatory area in the 1980s without joining the agreement (Anderson 1988). A bigger problem of opting out comes in the context of what is called open registration of shipping. All ships are required to be registered to a state, which determines the domestic and international rules they are required to follow and gives others the ability to know which state is responsible for the actions of a given ship. Traditionally, the ship was registered in the state where the owner has citizenship. In more recent times, some states have offered registration to any ship willing to pay the registration fee. The states that offer this “open” registration do so to earn money, and they therefore want many ships to register there. They make this increase in registration more likely by keeping fees and taxes low and also by requiring few regulatory obligations of ships. (For this reason, they are also called “flags of convenience” [FOC].) Because ships can change registration to these open registry states, fishing vessels that want to avoid regulation can choose to register in states that do not belong to the RFMOs in the regions where they fish; they are thereby not bound by any rules the RFMO passes (DeSombre 2005). One notorious vessel fishing in the Antarctic, the Thunder, had changed its name and registry state at least six times in order to avoid international rules and other efforts to prevent it from unregulated fishing (Urbina 2015). Other ways that states can legally avoid fishing obligations, even for agreements they have joined, is to object to regulations. (“Objecting” is a legal term and process, rather than simply a statement of discontent.) Because many fisheries agreements do not require unanimous voting in setting of regulations within the Commission, states would be reluctant to join if they knew they could be held to obligations they voted against. To allay that concern, these RFMOs include a formal process by which, after a regulation has been created,

Comparative International Fisheries Management    169 states can give official notice that they will not be bound by it. This process has been used to varying extents across RFMO. In some cases, it is rarely used, and states remove their objections once it becomes clear that the rules are necessary or not as onerous as predicted. In other cases, some of the most prominent fishing states regularly use the objections procedure to continue unrestricted fishing activity. A second difficulty faced by RFMOs is the possibility that those fishing in the regulatory area fail to live up to their obligations under the agreement. Although international rules are frequently upheld, rules about fishing have several characteristics that make them targets for potential noncompliance. There is a two-​level element to the regulation: states make (or agree to) rules, but in most cases it is not the formal apparatus of the state that engages in the regulated behavior. It is individual fishing vessels that make the decisions about what to catch and how, so even if a state is sincere in its wish to abide by international rules, the vessels it flags may break them. And because fishing takes place on the high seas, if fishing vessels decide to break the rules they can frequently do so without being detected. States vary in their interest or ability to police their own vessels. In more extreme cases—​ as happened with whaling during the Soviet era (Ivashchenko and Clapham 2014)—​states may actually direct or assist in the noncompliant behavior, filing catch reports they know to be incorrect. More frequently, though, states may simply not know, or not allocate the resources to figuring out, if their vessels are violating rules. Another difficulty is that RFMOs manage regionally. On some levels, that separate management approach makes sense; many of the species remain within the broad geographic area framed by a given RFMO, so focusing on a smaller group of states whose vessels are fishing for just those species in that area limits the decision-​making focus and number of actors. It allows for focused expertise, relevant to the species or the area, to be brought to bear on regulatory decisions. And it allows the set of actors most concerned to make decisions, though it does require far more time and resources for those states that participate in multiple RFMOs. Although most of the managed stocks stay in the designated regions, the fishing vessels may not. There is ample evidence that ships that have traditionally fished in one area are willing and able to move when their access to fishing options there are limited. Thus, even though RFMOs manage independently, they are affected by activity elsewhere. When RFMOs regulate more stringently, or when fish stocks in a region decrease, vessels move to other regions to fish, increasing fishing pressure on stocks elsewhere (Barkin and DeSombre 2013; Berkes et al. 2006; Hollway 2015; Blasiak 2015). For instance, in the 1980s through the early 2000s, the Spanish fishing fleet moved from catching Atlantic cod in the Northwest Atlantic, to catching Greenland halibut in the Northwest Atlantic, to catching skipjack tuna in the Eastern Central Pacific, as each stock was either overfished or increasingly regulated (Barkin and DeSombre 2013). More importantly, as long as the overall fishing effort—​assessed via the number of vessels, type of gear, and amount of time spent fishing—​does not decrease, global fish stocks are likely to be unable to sustain the existing level of fishing. Despite the potential disadvantages of managing species regionally by different RFMOs, this structure provides some advantages for scholars trying to understand fisheries management since it allows for the comparison of different regulatory processes, state interests, and environmental conditions. While so many factors vary that it is not simple to draw clear connections between any one regulatory approach, extent, or situation and effective

170   Elizabeth R. DeSombre fisheries management, nevertheless important differences are evident across institutions, both in the regulatory choices they make and in their level of success in managing fisheries. In addition, looking across institutions and across time, we see evidence of evolution in regulatory approaches and decision-​making structure, as well as institutions learning from each other in adopting new strategies and cooperating directly with each other. Ultimately, the variation in approaches and context likely has some relationship to management effectiveness across fisheries, though there are so many factors that could matter that it can be difficult to tease out causal relationships.

Regulatory Variation One of the ways that the current RFMOs differ is in their approaches to regulation. Some of this difference is in how the decision-​making processes they follow are set up. This can include voting procedures, as well as the ability to opt out of rules that have been created. More recently that ability to opt out of rules has generally become more restrictive, requiring justification and alternative measures. One element that differs across RFMOs is the voting structure required for deciding on regulations or agreeing to implement them. Beginning as far back as the International Whaling Commission (IWC) (created in 1946 by the International Convention for the Regulation of Whaling),1 fisheries organizations charged with passing restrictions on fishing have done so via non-​unanimous voting. This practice makes international agreements managing fisheries different from many international environmental agreements, which are more likely to require unanimity. In most cases the organizations strive for consensus, but have voting options that can be used if complete agreement cannot be reached. Not requiring that everyone agree in order to make decisions has many advantages. It avoids the “least common denominator” negotiations outcome, in which the only rules that are agreed on are those that no one opposes and are therefore likely to be the least restrictive options. Non-​unanimity allows for faster decision-​making because not all states need to be brought into agreement before action can be taken (Meltzer 2009, p. 188). Because of this structure, most of these agreements also allow “objections,” a legal process by which states that do not wish to be bound by a regulation passed by the organization have a certain amount of time after it has been passed to indicate that they are opting out of being bound by it. (This period is generally followed by another stretch of time if any states have objected, so that others may decide to lodge objections as well.) In some RFMOs, if a sufficient number of states have objected to a regulation via this process it no longer binds anyone. When an organization can pass rules without requiring unanimity it can take on more stringent rules, and those that are not willing to live up to them are able to opt out. In principle, even the states that opt out may be persuaded to remove their objections and take on the new rules. RFMOs that have this provision behave differently in the extent to which it has been used. In the Indian Ocean Tuna Commission (IOTC), the objections procedure was used only twice between 1996 and 2010 (Barkin and DeSombre 2013). That number has increased somewhat in recent years, with India objecting to four provisions in 2013, Australia objecting to one in 2016, and Pakistan to one in 2017 (IOTC 2019a). In the International Commission

Comparative International Fisheries Management    171 for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (ICCAT) the process was used for only three regulatory measures (by a total of six states) from 1969 through 2004 (Schiffmann 2008, p. 252), but, between 2005 and 2010, a total of eight states lodged objections to 18 different regulatory measures (Barkin and DeSombre 2013). In other RFMOs, the use of objections procedures has been much more extensive. States in NAFO lodged an average of 10 objections per year during the 1980s and 1990s, although that rate has slowed considerably in recent years (Lodge et al. 2007). In the Northeast Atlantic Fisheries Commission (NEAFC), between 1995 (the year when serious conservation measures were first passed) and 2010, member states lodged a total of 32 objections relating to 22 conservation measures (Schiffmann 2008, p. 55; Barkin and DeSombre 2013, p. 29). Some RFMOs with opt-​out provisions anticipate the problem that would come if more than a few states objected to conservation measures; those states would essentially free-​ride on the conservation action of others and may be able to catch enough fish to undermine the effectiveness of the regulation altogether. For that reason, a number of RFMOs (such as ICCAT, IOTC, NAFO, and NEAFC) have a contingency rule that if enough states object to a measure it will not apply to any. In NEAFC, it is three or more (Convention on Future Multilateral Cooperation in North-​East Atlantic Fisheries 1980, Article 12(2)(c)); in NAFO it requires a majority to have objected before a measure binds no states (Convention on Cooperation in the Northwest Atlantic Fisheries 1978, Article XIV(2)). Even when these states do not use objections procedures, their existence can influence the shape of the regulations that are passed. An effort to avoid having one or more states object can lead member states to pass less stringent regulations than otherwise desired; in some cases, during commission meetings states explicitly raise the possibility of objecting to a measure if one they do not like is passed. Even states that prefer stricter regulations for the long-​term health of the fishery and thus their fishing opportunities over time realize the danger of stronger rules to which some actors decide to free-​ride. Those who either explicitly threaten to opt out of more stringent rules or who advocate against such rules with everyone’s awareness of the possibility of an objection can thereby work to decrease the stringency of the rules that are passed. Some RFMOs instead use unanimous voting (or consensus; a slightly different approach that does not require everyone to agree, but requires no one to disagree) and therefore avoid the potential problems that come from objections procedures. The Inter-​American Tropical Tuna Commission (IATTC) does not have an objections procedure. It was originally created by the Convention for the Establishment of an Interamerican Tropical Tuna Commission in 1949, which requires unanimous voting. A later treaty (the Convention for the Strengthening of the Inter-​American Tropical Tuna Commission Established by the 1949 Convention Between the United States of America and the Republic of Costa Rica (2003)) specifies that rules are created by consensus, though it does allow members not present at the meeting who object to the decision when later informed of it to cancel its implementation for all members (Articles 4 and 6(c)). The Convention on the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources (CCAMLR), negotiated in 1980, also requires consensus for regulatory measures (CCAMLR 2020). Interestingly, though, CCAMLR nevertheless includes an objections procedure (CCAMLR Convention 1980, Article IX(6)(c)), a kind of redundancy that has never been used for actual conservation measures (Meltzer 2009). CCAMLR has a close connection to the

172   Elizabeth R. DeSombre Antarctic Treaty and its processes, which prioritize consensus, so it may not be surprising that this approach would appear in this context. The Convention for the Conservation of Southern Bluefin Tuna (CCSBT; 1993), which created the similarly named commission, requires unanimous voting (Article 7) and has no provision for objections. Similarly, the commission for the Southern Indian Ocean Fisheries Agreement (SIOFA; 2006) requires consensus for matters of substance (Article 8(1)). As recent fisheries agreements have moved toward using consensus, even those that continue to allow voting and objecting have worked to strengthen the likelihood of consensus. The Western and Central Pacific Fisheries Commission (WCPFC) (created by the Convention the Conservation and Management of High Migratory Fish Stocks in the Western and Central Pacific Ocean (2000)) emphasizes consensus. It does have a provision by which measures of substance can pass by a double majority vote (three-​quarters of two different groups of members) if consensus is not reached, though it allows for the appointment of a “conciliator” (Article 6(4)) to try to remedy any factors that might cause a state to vote against a regulatory measure. Instead of an objections procedure per se, the WCPFC includes a process by which states that were absent from votes (that passed by consensus), or voted against it if there was a formal vote, can ask for a measure to be reviewed for being either discriminatory or inconsistent with the organization’s treaty. A decision by the review panel can require the Commission to modify or drop the measure (WCPFC Article 6(6–​10)). A different way this issue has been addressed has been to allow, but limit, the use of objections. NEAFC, the Southeast Atlantic Regional Fisheries Organization (SEAFO), and South Pacific Regional Fisheries Management Organization (SPFRMO), among others, all now require some aspect of justification for opting out, rather than simply allowing it as a matter of course. SEAFO, for example, lays out the basis for which objections are permitted, including inconsistency with the treaty, discrimination, or inability to comply with the rule (Convention on the Conservation and Management of Fishery Resources in the South East Atlantic Ocean 2001, Article 23(1)). NEAFC did not originally have such a provision, but added one by a decision, taken in 2004, to amend the organization’s rules of procedure. NEAFC members that object to a conservation measure must indicate why and also indicate what alternative measures they plan to take (Meltzer 2009). Although there is no process for formally determining the validity of an objection, this process of justification at least requires states to publicly commit to alternative measures and may make baseless objection less likely. ICCAT has a similar provision as of 2012 (ICCAT 2012b). SPRFMO, established in 2012, takes a slightly different approach to addressing this potential problem. It allows for non-​unanimous voting and objections but only if “the decision unjustifiably discriminates in form or in fact against the member of the Commission or is inconsistent with the provisions of this Convention or other relevant international law”; it also requires the state that objects to a measure to adopt a measure deemed to be “equivalent in effect” (Convention on the Conservation and Management of High Seas Fishery Resources in the South Pacific Ocean 2009, Article 17(2)). This provision has been invoked. For example, an objection by Russia in 2013 was deemed to meet the “discriminatory” standard, but the alternative measures Russia adopted were not found to be equivalent (SPRFMO 2013), and, in 2018, Ecuador’s objection to the allocation of Chilean jack mackerel quota was deemed not to be discriminatory and thus not allowed (SPRFMO 2018).

Comparative International Fisheries Management    173 Another element that can vary across organizations is what is regulated via the commissions in an effort to protect the fish stocks in question. The most common approach is to limit the number of fish caught by creating an annual TAC. Initially TACs were collective. For example, the treaty underlying the IWC outlined permissible regulatory action the Commission could take, which included setting a TAC, but disallowed dividing the TAC by state (International Convention for the Regulation of Whaling 1946, Article 5(2)). CCAMLR has used a similar approach, passing TACs by regulatory area within the commission’s jurisdiction, rather than dividing an overall TAC among member states. Other early commissions used this process; most of these RFMOs no longer exist, having been phased out or renegotiated after the codification of EEZs expanded the area of the ocean that states are allowed to control. The other different approach to regulation controls capacity, or “effort,” rather than catches. This effort could focus on the number of vessels (usually in a particular size class) that can fish in a given season or the number of days vessels can fish. For example, until 2016, the IOTC didn’t impose specific catch limits but instead limited the number, size, and gear type of vessels that member states could use for fishing; those limits were generally expressed in relation to that state’s vessels in a previous year. While often used in domestic fishing contexts and likely chosen by the IOTC in part because of the dramatic differences in size and levels of development of member states, this approach failed to successfully manage stocks. Beginning in 2016, catch limits were imposed (IOTC 2019b). Even then, these limits are most frequently expressed in percentages of that state’s catches in a previous year, an approach that differs from most other RFMO catch limits.

Learning Across RFMOs While each RFMO was negotiated separately, operates independently, and has different member states, there is much overlap in membership and communication among secretariats, representatives, and scientific experts involved in these different regulatory processes. Moreover, these commissions often face similar difficulties in their management efforts. It is not surprising, then, that there is diffusion of regulatory practices over time across RFMOs. Innovations frequently begin in organizations facing a particular problem most acutely (or that have a management process that is either unusually cooperative or dominated by especially powerful states that have an interest in addressing an issue) and then are proposed by experts or shared members in other commissions. A few important examples of this learning across commissions include overuse of objections procedures, ensuring that only authorized ships fish in the regulatory area, encouraging membership from non-​member states who flag vessels fishing in the area, and enforcement of fishing rules.

Limiting Objections The changes over time in voting and objections procedures discussed earlier also serve as a long-​term example of learning that plays out across RFMOs, with ones negotiated later

174   Elizabeth R. DeSombre in time being less likely to use, or more likely to constrain the use of, the practice of opting out of management decisions. In some cases these changes simply involve differences in agreements that were negotiated later in time, but in other instances existing practices have been procedurally amended; at this point, most RFMOs with objections procedures have done something to try to constrain their use. Discussions in the decision-​making processes of these organizations indicate that the members are aware of the use of these modifications by other RFMOs, even—​in the case of ICCAT—​indicating that the policy of other organizations “could be useful models” (ICCAT 2012a, p. 19).

Vessel Tracking, Monitoring, and Observation Among the first practices adopted serially across RFMOs was the process of vessel monitoring. Once it became clear that ships flagged in states that were not parties to RFMO agreements were fishing in areas that those organizations oversaw, the RFMOs began to take steps to keep track of which ships were authorized to fish in these areas and which were not. Initially RFMOs began lists of vessels allowed to fish in their regulatory areas. Some have gone further, creating “black lists” (those ships that are explicitly disallowed because of bad practices or lack of participation in the regulatory process). The adoption by the tuna RFMOs of a collective list of authorized vessels for all of the organizations that manage tuna takes this process even further, though in practice it is really just an aggregation of the lists from the individual RFMOs. Other approaches focused more directly on compliance with (rather than acceptance of) RFMO rules have included exchanges of observers on fishing vessels and satellite tracking devices or other forms of electronic monitoring. Observers are the earlier, and more widespread, practice. Exchanging observers requires no technology and so was an easy early way to reassure those concerned that other state’s vessels may not be living up to the rules they agreed to. The practice began in the IWC in the early 1970s, though originally proposed in the 1950s (Ausubel and Victor 1992). Initially individual countries (first, Australia and South Africa, followed by others) agreed to exchange observers on their whaling stations; the program was expanded thereafter. Almost all RFMOs at this point mandate observers on at least some proportion of the vessels allowed to fish in their regulatory areas (Meltzer 2009), though the extent of observer coverage varies widely, and what they track—​scientific information, compliance with catch mandates, or other information—​varies as well. Only three RFMOs—​NAFO, SEAFO, and the Commission for the Conservation and Management of the Pollock Resources in the Central Bering Sea (CCBSP)—​currently mandate 100% observer coverage, though CCAMLR requires 100% observer coverage on vessels fishing for Patagonian toothfish and, as of 2020, krill, the primary species of concern (Ewell et al. 2020). Observer coverage is expensive, inconvenient, and sometimes dangerous for the observers (Ewell et al. 2020); the willingness of RFMOs to commit to observers on all fishing vessels seems to involve a combination of reasonably small numbers of member states and some allegation of illegal fishing practices. While it is clear that the RFMOs have modified their observer programs over time in response to the experience of other RFMOs, as well as their own experiences and needs, Ewell et al. evaluate the robustness of the observer programs (excluding the IWC in their

Comparative International Fisheries Management    175 analysis) across organizations. They conclude that ICCAT, WCPFC, NAFO, and IOTC (followed closely by CCAMLR, SFPRFMO, and IATTC) have the best monitoring systems overall (Ewell et al. 2020). Other forms of electronic monitoring (such as cameras programmed to operate and stream video when a vessel’s fishing gear is hauled in) are beginning to be adopted as an alternative to human observers or as an addition. At this point ICCAT, NAFO, and SIOFA, have policies that allow for such approaches, and SPRFMO says that some vessels have the capacity for this kind of monitoring. A vessel monitoring system (VMS), in which ships are tracked by satellite, can determine where ships are fishing and thus help document whether fish are caught were they are allowed to be. It has been controversial; when CCAMLR first required it in 2001, data from the tracking could only be accessed by those states that flagged the vessels because states otherwise would not agree to adopt the program. CCAMLR now requires that flag states send the VMS data they collect to the secretariat (CCAMLR 2018), but it is still carefully guarded and generally not available to the public. Additional RFMOs adopted VMS to varying degrees subsequently; at this point IATTC, ICCAT, NAFO, and NEAFC have at least some satellite tracking, and SEAFO requires VMS on all ships authorized to fish in its regulatory area as of 2006. The WCPFC created its program in 2009, and it now requires states to report VMS data to the Commission (WCPFC 2018). VMS is most frequently used by states to keep track of their own vessels (within the context of RFMO rules) than for RFMOs to be able to do so, however, even though states are more frequently required to share that data with the RFMOs.

Catch Documentation Another process that was adopted across multiple RFMOs once it began was the creation of what eventually came to be known as catch documentation schemes. This process evolved across RFMOs, with several influencing each other in a way that eventually resulted in a common set of approaches. These schemes are designed to allow the tracing of shipments of fish that were caught within the regulatory processes of certain RFMOs and allow—​or require—​RFMO member states to only accept fish caught within the regulatory process. These efforts emerged as a response to the phenomenon of FOC fishing. Most RFMOs have struggled with the problem of vessels flagged in non-​member states fishing within their regulatory areas, a practice that is arguably technically legal (since states and their vessels are only bound by the regulatory processes they have taken on) but that undermines the ability of commissions to manage the fisheries within their purview. This phenomenon grew more problematic in the late 1990s and early 2000s, as some open-​registry states (those that allow ship registration from non-​nationals; more derisively called FOCs) began courting registration from fishing vessels while refraining from joining RFMOs. Re-​registering to avoid regulation has been an occasional strategy for fishing vessels since the mid-​20th century, but it became a more common practice at the beginning of the 21st century. Belize was, for a while, one of the most prominent states, and Panama (the world’s biggest ship registry), Honduras, and St. Vincent and the Grenadines were also open-​registry states that flagged multiple fishing vessels while remaining apart from the RFMOs for the regions in which their flagged vessels fished (DeSombre 2005). Of new

176   Elizabeth R. DeSombre fishing vessels built in the period 2000–​2003, 14% registered in open-​registry states, and some estimates put that percentage as of 2002 at 21.5% (ICTFU et al. 2002). This practice caused serious problems for RFMO management efforts. By the late 1990s and early 2000s, ICCAT estimated that 10% of the catch of the species it manages was being caught by vessels flagged in non-​member states (OECD 2004). The CCSBT estimated in 1999 that 15% of its catch was by non–​member-​flagged ships (Swan 2002), and, by 2004, the estimate was up to one-​third of its catches (OECD 2004). The IOTC estimated that 10% of its catch in this era came from non–​member-​state vessels (Swan 2002). Even more dramatic were the estimates from CCAMLR, which estimated that twice as much fishing came from non–​member-​flagged vessels as from those flagged in member states (DeSombre 2005). ICCAT, the first to experience the problem, was also the first to craft ways to address it. Beginning in 1992, it created a “bluefin tuna statistical document” that accompanies any bluefin tuna caught by member states to attest that it was caught within the regulatory process when the fish are transshipped or traded. Beginning in 1996, it started authorizing trade sanctions—​ specifically focused on preventing trade in ICCAT species—​ against states whose ships were fishing in contravention of ICCAT rules. The more important development began in 2002, when ICCAT members agreed that they would only accept the landings, transshipment, or trade of bluefin tuna from ships that were on the organization’s white list. The program was expanded to also apply to bigeye tuna and swordfish, the other major fish species that ICCAT regulates (DeSombre 2005). Other tuna-​governing RFMOs followed suit. The CCSBT created what it called a “trade information scheme” in 2000; it requires a “bluefin tuna statistical document” that attests to where and how the fish was caught to accompany tuna caught within the process and that member states refuse to trade in tuna not accompanied by such a document (DeSombre 2005). The IOTC in 2001 created a “bigeye tuna statistical document” that member states are required to inspect before allowing the transshipment, landing, or trade of bigeye tuna from this region; as with the other such documents, it demonstrates that the tuna it accompanies were caught within the IOTC regulatory process (DeSombre 2005). Outside of the tuna RFMOs, the first organization to take up this approach was CCAMLR. It created a catch documentation scheme for Patagonian toothfish (the primary species regulated at the time) in 2000 (Green and Agnew 2002). This was the first formal process requiring that documentation travel with catches and that member states only accept landings or transshipment (or trade) of fish accompanied by such documentation. CCAMLR has had the same problems with FOC-​registered vessels fishing in its regulatory areas that the tuna RFMOs experienced, and this measure allowed states to track, and prioritize, fish caught with the regulatory process. As with the tuna RFMOs, it helped that the primary markets for the fish caught in the regulatory area were member states of the organization and could therefore meaningfully affect the market for fish caught outside of the regulatory process by agreeing to this type of measure. By 2008, ICCAT’s process had become a true catch documentation scheme, and the same was true of the CCSBT in 2010 (Hosch n.d.). In other words, the tuna organizations that had initiated the general practice of identifying and tracking species caught within the regulatory process then adopted the variations of its approaches that CCAMLR created, leaving all three organizations with similar approaches and strong evidence that they are learning from each other how best to minimize fishing outside their regulatory processes.

Comparative International Fisheries Management    177

Cooperation Across RFMOs The separate regulatory processes of each RFMO help account for the global difficulties in fisheries regulation; even if one institution can regulate effectively, vessels that fish in that area may also be fishing in other areas, and successful regulation in one region may put fishing pressure on other regions. In some cases fish species themselves might move between regulatory areas (Thompson 2003), something that may become more prominent as the ranges of species change in response to climate change. Over time there has been more formal cooperation across different RFMOs, largely because of the common issues they have been dealing with. In 1999, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) created what eventually came to be known as the Regional Fisheries Bodies Secretariat Network (RSN). It meets every 2 years and consults about such things as harmonizing catch documentation schemes and vessel lists (FAO 2020a). Smaller scale cooperative efforts include such endeavors as NEAFC and NAFO creating a joint list of illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) vessels fishing across their region, since ships operating illicitly in one part of the Atlantic may easily move across the regulatory areas of both organizations. They have also done some coordination of management measures for redfish species that move between regulatory areas (Lodge et al. 2007). The deepest cooperation has come from the five RFMOs that manage tuna species around the world. They manage similar species in different areas, were created at different time periods, and have different membership in their commissions (Table 9.1). These RFMOs first held a joint meeting in 2007, in Kobe, Japan, during which they discussed common challenges (such as data collection and effective stock management) but did not make any substantive management commitments. They did commit to continuing what became known as the “Kobe process” of collaboration and have had several joint meetings since then (a main one approximately every 2 years and workshops and meetings focused on specific topics in some other years) to share information and strategies. The collaboration has a website where reports and lists can be found—​such as IUU vessel lists and lists of vessels authorized to fish in the different regulatory areas. It has also agreed to standardized formats for data collection and observer reports, but this has not resulted in genuine collaboration on management or other regulation and mostly just serves to keep the different tuna RFMOs apprised of what each is doing.

Table 9.1 The tuna RFMOs (and year of founding treaty) CCSBT

Commission for the Conservation of Southern Bluefin Tuna (1993)

IATTC

Inter-​American Tropical Tuna Commission (1949)

ICCAT

International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (1966)

IOTC

Indian Ocean Tuna Commission (1993)

WCPFC

Western and Central Pacific Fisheries Commission (2000)

178   Elizabeth R. DeSombre Some scholars have suggested either consolidating RFMOs into one large organization (Barkin and DeSombre 2013) or even just more directly merging those that address the same species or region (Joseph and Greenough 1979; Saila and Norton 1974; Gulland 1972). This approach would help avoid the broader phenomenon of “convention fatigue” (VanDeveer 2003) and be of particular benefit to developing countries for whom the resources—​scientific, financial, and bureaucratic—​required to participate in multiple organizations can be overwhelming. At the same time, however, RFMOs are resistant to giving up the control they have over fisheries management, and even the nascent cooperative efforts take place at the margins rather than involving catch limits or other significant regulatory decisions. Despite potential advantages of centralization, at this point the cooperative efforts engage additional bureaucracy rather than decreasing it. There are other entities taking action or making rules relating to fisheries in ways that overlap with RFMOs. Of central importance is the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) (1982), which put forth the legal requirement that states need to join regional fisheries bodies in areas where the vessels they flag fish (Articles 63(2) & 64). The awkwardly named Agreement for the Implementation of the Provisions of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea of 10 December 1982 Relating to the Conservation and Management of Straddling Fish Stocks and Highly Migratory Fish Stocks [1995]; frequently referred to as the Straddling Stocks or Fish Stocks Agreement [FSA]), lays out the requirement that states create RFMOs if one does not yet exist in the area in which their vessels fish and that existing RFMOs permit states with fishing interests in the area to join. Both of these provisions are generally considered to be customary law and thereby binding even on states that haven’t ratified the treaties (Lodge et al. 2007). The FAO also plays some coordinating roles in overarching fisheries management (including by RFMOs), though it does not take binding management action. Among other things, it aggregates scientific information about the health of fish stocks and global fishing effort, and it keeps records of catch by country and species in a uniform and accessible way. In addition, it provides technical assistance to fisheries development projects and policy assistance to individual states working to create rules for the domestic fisheries they manage. It has also overseen the creation of other cooperative efforts to address issues in fishing, like the 2016 Agreement on Port State Measures to Prevent, Deter and Eliminate Illegal, Unreported and Unregulated Fishing. It has a Committee on Fisheries, the only global standing intergovernmental organization focused on issues of ocean fisheries broadly, but it serves a primarily consultative role, rather than a regulatory one. (Other global organizations, like the UN Development Programme and the World Trade Organization, take actions that relate to ocean fishing capacity, but not in a directly stock-​management role.) Perhaps the most important recent global fisheries management process is the nascent effort, in part via the UNCLOS process, to protect “areas beyond national jurisdiction,” which in the context of oceans means the high seas. After preparatory meetings, the UN General Assembly in December 2017 adopted a resolution to convene a legally binding treaty on marine biodiversity in areas beyond national jurisdiction. These negotiations are currently ongoing (IUCN 2020).

Comparative International Fisheries Management    179

Variations in Effectiveness The most important comparative aspect of RFMOs is how they actually do at managing the stocks they oversee. This analysis is surprisingly hard to do for some of the reasons that fisheries are hard to manage in the first place: how abundant fish are is itself a contested question, there may be factors other than fishing of a specific stock that can account for its level of abundance, and not all fish stocks face the same fishing pressure, so abundance is not necessarily a sign of effective management processes. Nevertheless, there have been some efforts to compare effectiveness of stock management across fisheries organizations that are actually taking management actions. One creative analysis attempted to evaluate the (at that point 18) management RFMOs against both a set of operational criteria (what the authors think conceptually a good RFMO should do, like provide assistance to developing countries and conduct performance reviews) and a set of stock assessments compared to fishing effort. This latter approach involves assessing how much fishing of the stock happens compared to maximum sustainable yield (MSY) as well as what the current stock biomass is compared to biomass that would produce MSY (Cullis-​Suzuki and Pauly 2010). When assessing stock conservation, it’s important to note that most stocks under RFMO management have been declining; there are few true success stories in international fisheries management. Some of that is overdetermined: not only is fisheries management difficult for all the reasons discussed earlier, but RFMOs rarely regulate in a serious way until stocks are already unambiguously in decline. Nevertheless, the stocks managed by RFMOs vary considerably in how abundant they are over time, and presumably a genuinely effective RFMO would, at minimum, be able to prevent the worst declines. The Cullis-​Suzuki and Pauly assessment finds CCAMLR to have the healthiest stocks (Cullis-​Suzuki and Pauly 2010). This squares with other recent assessments of RFMOs, including a process-​based assessment by Marcus Haward who finds that CCAMLR meets most of the criteria he sets out for effectiveness (followed closely by NEAFC) (Haward 2020). But how these governance successes come to be are less clear. CCAMLR is a remote fishery, accessible only by large-​scale vessels (generally from rich countries). Its initial species of concern, krill, was likely saved not by impressive management but by the political and economic collapse of the Soviet Union, the main harvester of the stock (Gascón and Werner 2006). Comparing its effectiveness with the IOTC, in which a large number of the members are developing countries that depend economically on the stocks they fish, may miss non-​commission sources of variation. Most importantly, though, Cullis-​Suzuki and Pauly found no significant correlation between the “best practice” measures that RFMOs had taken on and successful stock management (Cullis-​Suzuki and Pauly 2010). Ultimately, it seems we do not yet know what the best ways are, institutionally, to manage fisheries. Other aspects of effectiveness research allow us to test theoretically derived hypotheses. In general it is suggested that cooperation over shared resources is more difficult the more actors are involved. The tendency to “free ride”—​not take action when others do—​is greater in part because it is harder to be certain that others will act in a precautionary manner and in part because negotiation is more difficult among more actors. There is some evidence for

180   Elizabeth R. DeSombre this proposition: fisheries that are more highly “shared”—​in other words, that have fishers from more states fishing them—​are more likely to be overexploited (McWhinnie 2009). There are other efforts under way to test additional hypothesis. One such (ongoing) study (Barkin et al. 2018) examines determinants of individual state positions within RFMOs, using a common set of states and institutions. It hypothesizes that aspects of domestic politics—​such as the dependence of a state on a fish stock, its subsidization of and political capture by its fishing industry, and its capacity to fish for other species or in other regions—​influence negotiating positions within RFMOs and level of adherence to rules that are passed. Ultimately, when examining the structures, processes, and effects of regional fisheries management organizations, it is important to remember that international fisheries management is a difficult process. It requires international collective action, in which states agree to current costs for potential future benefits. These decisions take place under conditions of uncertainty: about what the actual health of the fishery is, about what other states will agree to and comply with, and what other threats to the stocks might be. It can be difficult to connect any one of these decisions to an ecological outcome. And it suggests that there are still many studies that remain to be done to explain the actions of states, the structures and processes of RFMOs, and, ultimately, the health of internationally managed stocks.

Note 1. The IWC is not technically an RFMO because it is a global, rather than regional organization; it is nevertheless generally considered a fisheries organization even though the whales it manages are mammals rather than fish.

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Comparative International Fisheries Management    181 CCAMLR. 2020. “Decision-​ making.” 2020. https://​www.cca​mlr.org/​en/​organ​isat​ion/​decis​ ion-​mak​ing Convention the Conservation and Management of High Migratory Fish Stocks in the Western and Central Pacific Ocean. 2000. Convention for the Conservation of Southern Bluefin Tuna. 1993. Convention on Cooperation in the Northwest Atlantic Fisheries. 1978. Convention on the Conservation and Management of Fishery Resources in the South East Atlantic Ocean. 2001. Convention on the Conservation and Management of High Seas Fishery Resources in the South Pacific Ocean. 2009. Convention on Future Multilateral Cooperation in North-​East Atlantic Fisheries. 1980. Cullis-​Suzuki, Sarika, and Daniel Pauly. “Failing the High Seas: A Global Evaluation of Regional Fisheries Management Organizations.” Marine Policy 34, no. 5 (2010): 1036–​1042. DeSombre, Elizabeth R. “Fishing Under Flags of Convenience: Using Market Power to Increase Participation in International Regulation.” Global Environmental Politics 5, no. 4 (2005): 73–​94. Ewell, Christopher, John Hocevar, Elizabeth Mitchell, Samantha Snowden, and Jennifer Jacquet. “An Evaluation of Regional Fisheries Management Organization At-​Sea Compliance Monitoring and Observer Programs.” Marine Policy 115 (2020): 1–​12. FAO. Regional Fishery Bodies (RFB) Web Site. Regional Fishery Bodies (RFB). FI Institutional Websites. FAO Fisheries and Aquaculture Department Rome. Updated April 21, 2017. http://​ www.fao.org/​fish​ery/​rfb/​en FAO. “Regional Fishery Body Secretariats Network (RSN).” 2020a. http://​www.fao.org/​fish​ery/​ rsn/​en FAO. State of the World’s Fisheries and Aquaculture 2020. Rome: FAO, 2020b. http://​www.fao. org/​3/​ca922​9en/​onl​ine/​ca922​9en.html Gascón, Virginia, and Rodolfo Werner. “CCAMLR and Antarctic Krill: Ecosystem Management Around the Great White Continent.” Sustainable Development Law & Policy 7, no. 1 (2006): 14–​16; 80. Green, Julia, and David Agnew. “Catch Documentation Schemes to Combat Illegal, Unreported, and Unregulated Fishing: CCAMLR’s Experience with Southern Ocean Toothfish.” Ocean Yearbook 16 (2002): 171–​194. Gulland, J. A. “Some Thoughts on a Global Approach to Tuna Management.” Economic Aspects of Fish Production: Proceedings of the International Symposium on Fisheries Economics. Paris: OECD: 228–​238, 1972. Haward, Marcus. Governing Oceans in a Time of Change: Fishing for the Future? Cheltenham UK: Edward Elgar, 2020. Hollway, James. The Evolution of Global Fisheries Governance, 1960-​2010. Dissertation, Oxford University, UK, 2015. Hosch, Gilles. “Catch Documentation Schemes: Practices and Applicability in Combating IUU Fishing.” FAO. n. d. http://​www.fao.org/​in-​act​ion/​globef​i sh/​fish​ery-​info​rmat​ion/​ resou​rce-​det​ail/​en/​c/​426​994/​ ICCAT. 2012a. Report of the 3rd Meeting of the Working Group on the Future of ICCAT. Madrid, Spain May 28–​31, 2012a. https://​www.iccat.int/​Docume​nts/​Meeti​ngs/​Docs/​2012_​ F​IWG_​REP_​ENG.pdf ICCAT. Resolution by ICCAT Regarding the Presentation of Objections in the Context of Promoting Effective Conservation and Management Measures Adopted by ICCAT; Resolution 12–​11. 2012b. https://​www.iccat.int/​Docume​nts/​Recs/​compe​ndio​pdf-​e/​2012-​11-​e.pdf

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Pa rt I I

M E T HOD S A N D C ON C E P T UA L C ON SI DE R AT ION S

Chapter 10

Interpret i v e Method ol o g i e s , Quantitative Met h od s, a nd C om pa rat i v e Environmenta l P ol i t i c s J. Samuel Barkin, V. Miranda Chase, and Saskia van Wees Introduction What do we mean by “comparative environmental politics,” and how should we study it? As the range of entries to this volume makes clear, the phrase can reasonably mean a range of different things. As such, the study of comparative environmental politics asks a number of different kinds of question and therefore calls for a variety of different research methods and methodologies, as the variety of work in this volume also makes clear. Ideally, the questions we want to ask about comparative environmental politics should drive the methods and methodologies we choose. But in practice this is unfortunately not always the case. For a variety of reasons, including narrow epistemological training, sunk costs in methods training, and the replication of existing patterns in research, certain kinds of questions tend to be associated with certain kinds of methods. In particular, quantitative methods tend to be associated with comparative inferential questions while interpretive questions tend to be associated with qualitative methods. In other words, statistics are generally used to do positivist hypothesis-​testing and are likely to be avoided in research designs that aim to understand individual cases. This chapter argues against these associations. It makes the case not only for methodological pluralism, understood as an openness to different ways of going about answering questions of comparative environmental politics, but also methodological creativity, understood as a willingness to use methods where and as appropriate, even when they do not fit into existing patterns seen in published research in the field. Such creativity both allows individual researchers

188    J. Samuel Barkin, V. Miranda Chase, and Saskia van Wees a greater array of tools with which to answer their questions and helps to build communication across different methodological and epistemological communities in environmental and comparative politics. The chapter begins by fleshing out the argument against assumed methodological associations (for a more thorough version of this argument, see Barkin and Sjoberg 2017). It identifies the use of quantitative methods in interpretive research as the biggest lacuna in the methodological playing field of comparative environmental politics (as distinct from what is often called “mixed-​method” research, which is generally inferential in design). The bulk of the chapter then presents two examples of how to use quantitative methods effectively in interpretive research, without embedding those methods in an epistemological positivism with which they are generally associated. These examples illustrate the range of possible uses of quantitative methods in comparative environmental politics research. They use different methods, some quantitative and some not. They use quantitative methods at different stages of the research, one to bracket interpretive case studies and the other to analyze relationships within the case. And one compares across countries while the other focuses on a single country. Both have in common that they use quantitative methods not to test hypotheses across cases but to analyze the complexities of outcomes within cases. The first of these cases, based on dissertation research by Saskia van Wees, looks at the different patterns of environmental performance and environmental foreign policy in India and China in the period 2002–​2012 (van Wees 2020). India during this period talked a great environmental game but performed poorly. China was almost the opposite; it performed relatively well on environmental indexes but tended not to advertise these results. The research begins with a statistical model that isolates the effects of standard explanatory variables such as levels of wealth, state capacity, and external normative pressure. These variables leave policy in middle-​income states underdetermined. van Wees’s argument is that the difference between India and China is state identity, a variable that is not subject to easy quantification. The statistical model, in other words, is used to identify the category of explanation that statistical models are not well placed to analyze. The second case, based on the dissertation research of V. Miranda Chase, looks at efforts by Indigenous and traditional communities in Brazil’s Amazon Basin to oppose the construction of dams that would impact their communities (Chase 2021). The research begins with a legal analysis, looking for sources of leverage by the communities in question against the state. It finds such leverage in Brazil’s international treaty commitments. Interestingly, though, the key source of leverage comes not from the realm of international environmental cooperation, but from international labor law. The research project then goes on to look at how, and how effectively, these communities use such sources of leverage to oppose dams. It does so by doing a social network analysis of relationships among community groups and their outside partners.

Inference, Interpretation, and Method One of the many potential ways of categorizing social science research is as inferential or interpretive, the former including studies that look for explanatory commonalities across cases and latter those that look for explanatory specificities within cases. The difference

Interpretive Methodologies, Quantitative Methods    189 between the two categories is more ontological than epistemological; more a question of what we want to study (the commonalities or peculiarities of cases) than of how we should go about studying it. And yet it is the norm, both within political science and to an extent within the social sciences more broadly, to associate this ontological categorization with distinctions of epistemology, methodology, and method (Barkin and Sjoberg 2017). This association results in two modal types of research in political science (Almond 1990; Schwartz-​Shea and Yanow 2002) and in the social sciences more broadly (Abbott 2001). The first type is a statistical model designed to test predefined causal hypotheses by identifying correlations in variables or their proxies. The epistemology in this type is positivist, narrowly understood, and the methods used are quantification and statistical regression. The second modal type of research is the descriptive case study designed to illuminate the specific circumstances (whether institutional, historical, cultural, etc.) that cause or constitute the conditions of possibility of a particular outcome or social condition. The epistemology in this type can range from the analyticist to the reflexive; either way, the methods used tend to be historical narrative, broadly defined (Jackson 2011). There is no good methodological reason that research questions about common causal logics across cases should necessarily involve hypothesis-​testing epistemology and statistical methods while questions about case distinctiveness should necessarily eschew mathematical methods. It is useful in discussing this claim to differentiate between research methods, understood here as specific tools for gathering and analyzing information, and methodology, understood here as the logic explaining how a specific set of methods are appropriate for addressing a given research question. Specific methods for analyzing information, be those methods statistical or narrative, can be used for a variety of methodological purposes. They can be used to describe within cases or to compare across cases. They are inherently biased neither to positivist, philosophically realist, or deconstructive epistemologies. They are tools for manipulating information, wherever that information came from or whatever purposes it is being used for (Barkin and Sjoberg 2017). While there is no good methodological reason that these two modal types predominate in political science research, there are understandable disciplinary reasons why they might do so (Abbott 2001). Scholars are often trained in one tradition or the other and replicate the tradition in which they are trained. The sunk costs of methods training bias scholars toward staying within their tradition, and doing so means that one does not have to justify one’s methodology. Furthermore, being trained within one tradition or the other can bias the way one asks research questions in the first place (Kuhn 1962). Scholars trained in hypothesis-​testing and quantitative models are thus more likely to think in terms of inferential questions, while those trained in, say, area studies are more likely to think in terms of interpretive questions. Research that does not fit into one of these two modal types is often of a kind that attempts to replicate the epistemology and methodology of the inferential statistical model as closely as possible when the data available are not numerous enough to generate statistically significant results or when the hypotheses in question do not suggest quantifiable proxies. There is an extensive literature on how to do this, some of which focuses explicitly on how to replicate the logic of inferential statistical modeling with case studies (King, Keohane, and Verba 1994) and some of which focuses on how to select and design case studies with cross-​case comparison in mind (e.g., Bennett and Elman 2007 and, to a certain extent, George and Bennett 2004). This allows a variety of methods often classified as qualitative,

190    J. Samuel Barkin, V. Miranda Chase, and Saskia van Wees

Epistemology

Methods

Inferential

Interpretive

Quantitative

Statistical hypothesis testing

?

Qualitative

“Mixed-​methods” and “multimethods” research

Critical theory and area studies

ranging from historiographic to the process analytic, to be brought to bear in the service of hypothesis-​testing. If one were to create a 2 × 2 chart of epistemology and methods, then, with inferential/​ interpretive on one axis and quantitative/​qualitative on the other, one would find three of the resulting four boxes to be well filled. The inferential-​quantitative box is filled with exercises in statistical hypothesis testing that fill so many of the most prestigious journals in the disciplines of political science and international relations. The interpretive-​qualitative box is filled with research ranging from critical theoretical work in international relations to area studies work in comparative politics. The inferential-​qualitative box is supported by a growing body of methodological theory. There is even a disciplinary movement that arrogates the term “mixed-​methods” (sometimes “multimethod”) for research that uses both statistical and narrative case-​study methods for (and only for) inferential theory-​ building (Seawright 2016). But what of the fourth box, encompassing interpretive epistemology and quantitative methods? There is much less published research in political science that would fit in this box than in the other three, and much less literature on how to do this kind of work. This lacuna represents a waste of potential. Many epistemologically interpretivist scholars may associate quantitative methods disciplinarily with the sort of hypothesis-​testing exercises that are the hallmark of positivist research, but there is no good methodological reason for this association. Statistical techniques are methods of describing data. Such descriptions can be used for inferential hypothesis-​testing purposes, as can narrative descriptions. But they can also be used to describe other kinds of relationships in the data, relationships of the sort that interpretive scholars focus on. These uses range from simple descriptive statistics (e.g., Ackerly et al., 2017) to social network analysis (e.g., Hoffmann 2017).

Comparative Environmental Politics and Methodology How does this discussion of methodology relate to comparative environmental politics? Paul Steinberg and Stacy VanDeveer define comparative environmental politics as “the systematic study and comparison of environmental politics in different countries” (Steinberg and VanDeveer 2012, p. 5). In deciding what makes a good study, the “litmus test in each case is whether the results speak directly to the interests of those studying other topics and places” (Steinberg and VanDeveer 2012, p. 9). The payoff, in other words, is the generalizable

Interpretive Methodologies, Quantitative Methods    191 theory rather than the greater understanding of the specific topic and place; that “the hallmark of comparative politics research is that it relates particular empirical instances to broader theories” (Steinberg and VanDeveer 2012, p. 9). This argument fits neatly into the inferential tradition in political science. Steinberg and VanDeveer are clearly open to a variety of methods in the pursuit of comparative environmental politics as they define it. In particular, they note the utility of both large-​N statistical modeling and detailed case studies in building theory, which can then be applied to generate more effective environmental policy. They are methodologically pluralist. Epistemologically, however, they are more constrained: a variety of methods and methodologies can be used to generate knowledge about comparative environmental politics, but the purpose of that knowledge is generalizable theories of causality. To be fair, these claims are not actually central to Steinberg and VanDeveer’s core purpose in the volume in question, which is to bring some of the insights of comparative politics, primarily that domestic politics and policy matters, to the study of global environmental politics. Furthermore, they acknowledge that embedded social histories, of the sort that do not lend themselves well to cross-​national comparison, matter as well (and see Sower 2012, in that volume). As such, they are making the case that we should pay more attention to comparison across countries for the purpose of theory-​building to better understand environmental politics, rather than arguing that this is what we should exclusively be doing. Nonetheless, while their definition of the field is explicitly open to a wide range of methods, it shows a bias toward inferential methodologies. This bias can affect the research done in comparative environmental politics in three ways. It can affect the questions that scholars believe they can ask in a disciplinarily legitimate way, limiting them to queries about general theory rather than questions about specific context. It can reinforce barriers between area studies scholars and students of comparative environmental politics. And it can hinder efforts to apply theory by biasing research toward the general case rather than the complications of the specific application. So then, comparative environmental politics should embrace interpretive as well as inferential epistemologies. Perhaps ironically, interpretive methods are more common in the study of international than of comparative environmental politics (e.g., Bernstein 2001, Epstein 2008). But that still leaves it with only three out of the four boxes in the epistemology/​method 2 × 2 table occupied because quantitative methods are no better represented in interpretive work in comparative environmental politics than they are in political science and international relations more broadly. Creating disciplinary space for the fourth box to be filled gives researchers access to more tools with which to understand the structures of domestic environmental politics globally. Talking about how to use quantitative methods in interpretive work in comparative environmental politics is much less straightforward than talking about how to use qualitative methods in inferential work. In the latter case the stated goal is generally to use the methods in a way that replicates to the greatest degree possible the logic of statistical modeling when quantifying data are not available in sufficient quantity to generate useful statistical results. In the former case, however, there is in fact greater scope to use the methods in question creatively, in part because the category of interpretive work encompasses a variety of epistemologies (Jackson 2011; Barkin and Sjoberg 2019). The two empirical examples offered in the next sections of this chapter suggest two different parts of interpretive research designs into which different quantitative methods can

192    J. Samuel Barkin, V. Miranda Chase, and Saskia van Wees fit. The first example, comparing Chinese and Indian environmental postures, begins with a standard inferential hypothesis-​testing regression model but uses this model methodologically not to test when the hypotheses work, but to identify their limits. It then develops interpretive case studies to show how case-​specific identities explain what generalized theory cannot. The second example, of Indigenous opposition to dams in the Brazilian Amazon, uses as its quantitative method social network analysis rather than regression analysis. It also uses the method at the other end of the research design: rather than using qualitative analysis to identify the limits of quantification, it uses it to describe a set of relationships within a broader interpretive case.

China, India, and Compliance with Global Environmental Norms The key empirical puzzle motivating the first of these examples is the difference between what might be called China’s and India’s environmental postures between 2002 and 2012 (the discussion in this section is adapted from van Wees 2020). During this period China performed significantly better on indexes designed to measure environmental performance. Yet India was much more active than China in advertising its role in multilateral environmental cooperation and leveraging that role for international political purposes. Both countries have large, middle-​income economies, and both can be thought of as regional superpowers. Why the difference? A key part of the answer is state identity, understood in this context as the dominant narratives that a state’s governing elite has at any given moment regarding the state’s historical roots, purpose, and, most importantly, social and governing structures. Identity understood in this way is key to understanding decision-​making and norm compliance (or lack thereof), as well as states’ calculations about their international position relative to both rivals and allies. Evidence concerning the narratives that constitute state identity can be found in sources such as official government texts, ranging from press releases by government leaders to negotiating instructions of foreign offices. Evidence can also be found in interviews with government officials (where feasible) and articles from national news sources. The results of a narrative analysis of India’s foreign policy identity with respect to global environmental politics during this period indicate that the Indian government pushed a narrative in which India was a leader of the developing world and a good multilateralist citizen. It trumpeted its participation in multilateral environmental fora and lobbied to host multilateral environmental events. It made a point of meeting (or of claiming to meet) its environmental treaty commitments. When negotiating such commitments, it claimed to act not only in its national interest or for the global public good, but in the interests of developing countries as a group against developed country dominance of multinational negotiations and international environmental norms. Whether public adherence to these norms improved India’s environmental performance (however measured) during this period is unclear; its performance was in any case notably poor. But India’s identity as a good multilateralist and leader of the developing world, committed to reforming the system from

Interpretive Methodologies, Quantitative Methods    193 within rather than fundamentally changing it, clearly informed its public relationship with these norms. China’s identity was quite different. China’s domestic environmental performance improved notably between 2002 and 2012, primarily for domestic political reasons rather than because of international environmental norms. Unlike India, though, the Chinese government did not trumpet this improvement as reflecting norms or multilateral commitments. It could have attempted to leverage its environmental performance diplomatically; for the most part, however, it did not. It participated in multilateral environmental negotiations and often joined the resulting treaties, but it neither expressed the sort of commitment India made to leadership of developing countries as a whole in these fora, nor acted as if supporting the multilateral environmental system itself was a diplomatic priority. For China, the goal was competition with the United States rather than leadership of a developing country block. Thus, whereas for India to claim conformity with the existing international environmental norms structure while moving that structure in a more developing-​world-​friendly direction showed leadership, for China to do so would show acquiescence to US leadership. The methodologically tricky aspect of this argument is that identity-​based explanations of differences between two (or more) cases can run into a number of potential issues. How do we know that it is really identity that is causing the difference in outcomes rather than any number of other theoretically grounded (and more easily measured) variables? On what basis do we compare identities across actors when they are not meaningfully quantifiable or even directly comparable on congruent axes? How do we separate identities from actions? The standard template for what has come to be referred to in political science as “mixed-​ methods” is to use a two-​stage research design, in which the first stage is a statistical model designed to establish correlation among a set of variables hypothesized to be causally related, and then to use case study (usually process-​tracing) methods to provide an example or examples of causal process (e.g., Berg-​Schlosser 2012). This design brings the whole methodology within an inferential epistemology; the qualitative case is intended as an example (or plausibility probe) of a causal process expected to be repeated in other cases within a general category specified by the statistical model. But this research design does not quite work with identity as a causal variable because identity is not a binary or linear variable; it does not work the same way across cases within a class. This means that isolating it as a variable in the statistical model is problematic. One solution to this problem is to use a two-​stage research design with a statistical model as the first stage and case studies in the second, but to leave the key causal variable of interest out of the model. Identity itself cannot be effectively tested in a regression model because it does not vary quantitatively. It is not a question of how much identity states have, but a question of what kind; a qualitative rather than quantitative question. The model then functions not to estimate the correlation between identity and environmental foreign policy, but to identify the space in which identity might drive policy. It identifies the characteristics of countries where identity has the most space to make a difference to foreign environmental policy. This is a use of a two-​stage research design incorporating both statistical models and case studies that is epistemologically interpretive rather than inferential. The statistical model in this case focused on four explanatory variables commonly found in the literatures on global environmental politics and international norm compliance. The first is the idea of the environmental Kuznets curve (EKC), which suggests that poor and

194    J. Samuel Barkin, V. Miranda Chase, and Saskia van Wees rich countries will pollute the least (poor countries because they do not generate sufficient economic activity to pollute much, rich countries because they can afford to mitigate their pollution), while middle-​income countries will pollute most. The second is state regulatory capacity, which is measured by two different proxies. The third is openness to pressure from below, measured as freedom of the press and levels of NGO activity. The fourth is pressure from the international community and international civil society, building on the international norms literature on naming and shaming. The results of the quantitative analysis suggest that the EKC has the largest effect on environmental performance and that state capacity also has significant effects. Neither pressure from below nor pressure from the international community, however, have clear effects on environmental performance (once levels of per capita wealth are controlled for). This is in itself a useful finding in comparative environmental politics. A division of countries into different levels of wealth, though, shows that rich and poor countries have lower variation in environmental performance than middle-​income countries, particularly upper-​ middle-​income countries. In other words, for countries at the rich and poor ends of the scale state identity has less scope to make a difference to environmental performance than for middle-​income countries. This means that it is for middle-​income countries that studies of individual state environmental identity are most likely to yield explanations of different environmental policy behavior. This is where the case studies of China and India fit into the methodology. Rather than the process-​tracing case studies that are the second part of the standard “mixed-​methods” template, these studies are discourse-​analytic. They are designed to get at what the two respective governments say with respect to the relationship between their domestic and foreign environmental policies, how they justify their actions, and who their audiences are. They are designed to be parallel in terms of method and case structure. But, unlike comparative case studies in the inferential mold, they are not designed to highlight parallel causal structures. They are designed to focus on what is unique about each identity, not what identities have in common or whether they are in some way parallel in structure or content. The case studies therefore show how identity informs policy in each case, but not how identity tends to inform policy in the general case. Phrased differently, the cases allow us to identify differences in identity between China and India and how these differences are implicated in different foreign environmental policies, but they do not allow us to infer anything about the relevant aspects of identity in third countries. What they do allow us to do is understand better where the foreign environmental policies of China and India are coming from, how they relate to domestic environmental policy in the eyes of national leaders, and how best to engage them in multilateral environmental cooperation.

Indigenous Resistance to Dams in Brazil The question underlying the second example in this chapter is whether or not international organizations or multilateral legal instruments make any difference to efforts by Indigenous and traditional communities in the Brazilian Amazon to combat large-​scale dam construction in their traditional territories (the discussion in this section is adapted from Chase 2021, except where noted). An obvious first place to look for an answer to this question is

Interpretive Methodologies, Quantitative Methods    195 the final report of the World Commission on Dams (WCD), which contains a comprehensive set of guidelines for dam-​building, including guidelines about relations with and participation of Indigenous peoples (World Commission on Dams 2000). But the WCD was a nongovernmental body and its report is non-​binding. There is little evidence that it has any impact on either decision-​making by the Brazilian government or the effectiveness of claims made by the communities in question. Given the apparent functional irrelevance of the WCD report, there are at least three methods with which one could continue to pursue the question. A top-​down method would involve making a list of international organizations and instruments that seem germane to the question of dams. One could then work one’s way down that list one at a time until one finds something that makes a difference. One could systematically review a set of documents, whether generated by government decision-​makers or organizations representing Indigenous communities, and see which organizations or instruments are discussed. Or one could talk to representatives of those organizations and see what inputs from the multilateral world they are using. The last of these three methods yielded surprising results, surprising enough that they might have been missed by an attempt to comprehensively review international environmental instruments relevant to dam construction, because the instrument of note is not an international environmental instrument. The international instrument that turns out to be the most important legal tool for Brazilian Indigenous and traditional communities fighting large-​scale dam construction is a treaty negotiated under the auspices of the International Labour Organization, the 1989 Indigenous and Tribal Populations Convention (International Labour Organization 1989). This treaty, of which Brazil is a signatory, includes the principle of free, prior, and informed consultation (FPIC) of Indigenous communities that will be materially affected by development of natural resources on their lands and of prior informed consent for their removal from such lands (on FPIC more broadly, see Barelli 2012 and Bartley in this volume). These principles are not particularly well fleshed out in the Convention but are nonetheless legally binding commitments by the Brazilian state. And yet, as a relatively small part of a treaty that is not the obvious place to look as a source of environmental rights and processes, the principles were at first easy for the Brazilian government to ignore and for anti-​dam activists to miss. In practice, knowledge of and willingness to claim rights of prior informed consultation diffused slowly among activist groups. Roughly a decade after Brazil ratified the Convention, Indigenous and traditional communities affected by dam (and other development) projects in the Brazilian Amazon Basin began developing their own consultation protocols and demanding that these be used rather than processes that the government had developed (and largely ignored). The combination of the legal right to consultation enshrined in international law and community-​driven consultation protocols has by no means been a panacea for activists, but it does provide them with a useful legal and normative tool in pursuing the rights of Indigenous and traditional communities in these disputes (Chase 2019). Why and how did this particular norm of FPIC diffuse through the collection of actors involved in making and disputing decisions about dam construction in Brazil? This question is relevant not only to students of Brazilian environmental and Indigenous politics, but also to students of norm diffusion in international relations and comparative politics more generally. In particular, there is a debate about whether international norms are most likely to diffuse from the top down (i.e., from powerful states and international organizations), from

196    J. Samuel Barkin, V. Miranda Chase, and Saskia van Wees the bottom up, or via nongovernmental international networks. This case, therefore, speaks to broader debates in comparative politics, international relations, and beyond. How then to address the question of how the norm of consultation diffused in this particular case to the point where it is now broadly accepted not only among Indigenous groups, but among government planners as well? As phrased, this is a question about network structure because it asks about the connections among participants through which norms travel. This makes it a good candidate for a set of methods collectively called social network analysis (SNA) (Hafner-​Burton, Kahler, and Montgomery 2009; Borgatti, Everett, and Johnson 2013; Hoffmann 2017). These are tools for mapping and analyzing the patterns of connections among a set of actors, understood either as individuals or organizations. SNA is generally thought of as a set of quantitative tools both because the data need to be quantified prior to analysis and because statistical techniques can be brought to bear on network maps to show network characteristics that are not visually obvious. One thing SNA does well is measure the centrality of actors to networks, the extent to which they are positioned to facilitate connections across the network. What SNA shows in this case is that the debate about how international norms diffuse is, to an important extent, asking the wrong question. Individual examples of the creation of consultation protocols generally involve a variety of different kinds of actors, including Indigenous and traditional associations, national and international NGOs, media organizations, universities, and governmental organizations (although not all kinds are involved in all cases). Some of these organizations are more heavily connected, and are more central to the network of organizations involved in dam protests, than others. A surprising finding is that it is not just one kind of organization that tends to be central. The most central organizations include a variety of kinds, including Indigenous associations and grassroots organizations, universities, international foundations, and even Brazilian government organizations. It is not one kind of organization that is most likely to be key in the transmission of norms; rather, it is the position of the organization within the network. Organizations of whatever kind that are most centrally connected within the broad movement of resistance to dams are the greatest norm diffusers. This analysis can be read as a case study in support of a broader inferential test of theories of norm diffusion and localization (e.g., Keck and Sikkink 1998; Acharya 2009; Kauffman 2016) or as part of an interpretive analysis of Brazilian environmental and Indigenous politics more specifically. The methodology fits either epistemology. For the purposes of this chapter, the important thing to point out about the methodology is that even if the study is used as part of a broader inferential test, the SNA itself is being used in a descriptive rather than inferential way. Whereas the standard “mixed-​method” template begins with a statistical model to identify correlation and then undertakes narrative case studies to show causal process, the methodology in this example begins with a qualitative process of identifying key variables and then undertakes statistical modeling to help show causal process.

Methodology, Methods, and Pluralism What these two examples show, then, is that quantitative methods can be used in research in comparative environmental politics in ways other than traditional positivist inferential

Interpretive Methodologies, Quantitative Methods    197 modeling and can be combined with narrative methods in more ways than suggested by much of the recent “mixed-​methods” literature. There are, in other words, many ways, ranging from the straightforward use of descriptive statistics to more innovative methods and methodological forms, to fill in the fourth box of the epistemology/​methods chart discussed earlier in this chapter. A key part of this argument is the claim that neither methods nor epistemology dictate the other. “Method,” as used here, refers to specific techniques for acquiring, analyzing, or modeling information. A specific kind of regression analysis or process-​tracing or discourse analysis is a method. “Methodology” refers to the way in which methods are put together to answer a question in the context of a specific research project. Methods are thus transitive across research projects; the technical requirements of a good regression or a good discourse analysis are consistent across cases. But methodologies are specific to research projects; since a methodology is a way of answering a specific question, there is no reason to expect it to be transitive across questions. Methodology is therefore directly connected to both method and epistemology. It is connected to method in that any particular methodology needs to tell a convincing story about why its component methods answer the research question. It is connected to epistemology in that the story needs to fit within the rules of the epistemology of what constitutes acceptable evidence. This does not mean, however, that method and epistemology need directly constrain each other. The “mixed-​methods” literature argues in favor of methodological creativity in using a variety of nonquantitative methods to help answer epistemologically inferential questions. The same logic argues in favor of methodological creativity in using quantitative methods to answer interpretive questions. The two methodologies discussed in this chapter are examples of using different kinds of quantitative methods in different ways to help answer specific research questions. Both questions as asked are interpretative, but both methodologies could also contribute to related inferential questions. Nor are they intended by any means to be examples of modal or ideal types for this sort of research. The differences between the two methodologies are meant to indicate the potential range of quantitative methods that can be deployed in interpretive research into comparative environmental politics and of places and ways within methodologies that they can be used effectively. This should by no means be taken as an argument that quantitative methods should always, usually, or even often be used in research in comparative environmental politics in general, or in interpretive research in the field specifically. Rather, it is an argument for methodological pluralism. Start with a research question and figure out what methods might be useful in answering that question, whether or not those are the methods other scholars asking similar questions are using, whether or not they are the methods in which the researcher has been trained. It is an argument for reflectivity, about our training, about our assumptions about what constitutes good research, and about our assumptions about what kinds of method are supposed to be paired with what kinds of question. And, finally, it is an argument for methodological creativity, and perhaps even for methodological adventurousness. As Steinberg and VanDeveer argue in their call for more research into comparative environmental politics, there are many insights that we can usefully bring into the study of environmental politics from the comparative politics tradition. Methodological dogmatism is not one of those things.

198    J. Samuel Barkin, V. Miranda Chase, and Saskia van Wees

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Interpretive Methodologies, Quantitative Methods    199 Keck, Margaret, and Kathryn Sikkink. Activists Beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in International Politics. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998. King, Gary, Robert Keohane, and Sidney Verba. Designing Social Inquiry: Scientific Inference in Qualitative Research. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994. Kuhn, Thomas. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962. Schwartz-​Shea, Peregrine, and Dvora Yanow. “ ‘Reading’ ‘Methods’ ‘Texts’: How Research Methods Texts Construct Politics Science.” Political Research Quarterly 55 (2002): 457–​486. Seawright, Jason. Multi-​method Social Science: Combining Qualitative and Quantitative Tools. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016. Sower, Jeannie. “Institutional Change in Authoritarian Regimes: Water and the State in Egypt.” In Comparative Environmental Politics: Theory, Practice, and Prospects, edited by Paul Steinberg and Stacy VanDeveer, 231–​254. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012. Steinberg, Paul, and Stacy VanDeveer. Comparative Environmental Politics: Theory, Practice, and Prospects. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012. van Wees, Saskia. Status Seeking and Shades of Compliance with Global Environmental Norms: The Cases of China and India. Doctoral Dissertation, University of Florida, 2020. World Commission on Dams. Dams and Development: A New Framework for Decision-​ Making. London: Earthscan, 2000.

Chapter 11

Ethno g ra ph y in C omparat i v e Environmenta l P ol i t i c s Insights from the Water and Waste Fields Raul Pacheco-​V ega Comparative ethnography, understood as the research method that uses the comparative method to design projects that use ethnographic fieldwork to understand variation across cases (Schnegg and Lowe 2020) has enormous potential to help us understand comparative environmental political (CEP) issues. For example, we could examine how different communities adapt to rapid environmental change and abrupt climatic events (Burch 2010) and whether or not cities have designed proper adaptative climate policies (Vogel and Henstra 2015). We could use comparative ethnography to study how different cities’ urban water policies evolved through time (Herrera 2017a) and to better understand the politics of water governance across countries, for example, the particular cases of Brazil (Abers and Keck 2013) and Mexico (Herrera 2017b). Ethnographic fieldwork helps us understand how communities in Amazonia are able to counter governmental pressure and improve their governance systems (Kawa 2016) and discern how the politics of waste governance is driven by multiple, conflicting forces, whether in Boston or Seattle (Baum Pollans 2021) or New York City (Nagle 2014). Ethnography, understood as the systematic observation of populations with the intention of learning about the cultural inner workings of a societal group, is part of a larger suite of qualitative methods available to researchers in CEP. Ethnography has substantive value and is important and deserving of attention in CEP because it helps us better understand how individuals and communities govern (or mismanage) resources. While quantitative-​ focused methods (see, e.g., Barkin et al., this volume) could be used to understand patterns of environmental behavior, ethnography offers multiple avenues to help us discern the specific mechanisms of resource usage. Ethnography can also help us make the politics of the environment visible and explain how actors exert power to gain control over resources within specific contexts. Ethnography is not just fieldwork, though spending an extended time on the field is a prerequisite. Ethnography and comparative ethnography both focus on understanding culture within specific communities.

Ethnography in Comparative Environmental Politics    201 Culture is an elusive concept and certainly a hotly contested one. For the purposes of this chapter, I define culture as the set of patterns, norms, rules, and customs that permeate a society or group. Whether culture is an important category of study in comparative politics is an important question. I argue that understanding culture through ethnographic fieldwork is valuable because it enables us to understand the intricacies of power differentials, conflict and contestation regarding resource usage, mismanagement, and appropriation. Understanding how different communities appropriate, manage (or mismanage), and waste resources is a critical topic for scholars of CEP, and, in this chapter, I offer a couple of vignettes drawn from my own research that will help shed light on the value of ethnography and studies of culture in CEP. These patterns could not be better understood through other more quantitative approaches. Undertaking ethnography in different countries allows scholars to compare diverse approaches to conservation, environmental policy-​making, resource management, and governance strategies for a broad range of issues. This chapter offers a few suggestions on how to engage in comparative ethnography focused on environmental politics and describes how I have applied this approach to the study of the comparative politics of water and waste governance. Even though ethnography has commonly been used in a broad range of settings and disciplinary contexts, ethnography has regained popularity in political science, particularly from a comparative perspective. We can see value in showcasing the inner workings of a socially relevant research strategy based on qualitative methods for resource and environmental management. Moreover, methodologically speaking, doing comparative ethnography that is ethical, theoretically robust, and informed by the politics of local governance arrangements is extremely important to improve our understanding of CEP. This chapter showcases the application of a comparative ethnographic research strategy that pays attention to the potential vulnerabilities of the target populations, inspired by the doubly engaged ethnography concept (Pacheco-​Vega and Parizeau 2018). “Doubly engaged ethnography” refers to ethnography that is deeply committed to the community under study and to the scientific advancement of knowledge. It would be easy to say that all ethnography is or should be doubly engaged. However, in the Pacheco-​Vega and Parizeau model, the double engagement comes from the design and implementation of the method, that is, from the conceptualization and set of decisions made to engage in the process of investigation. Here, I propose that we use comparative ethnography informed by a logic and ethical framework of care, kindness, and respect for the communities under analysis to study CEP issues. This chapter draws on my research on bottled water consumption and informal waste picking to show how a doubly engaged comparative ethnography has the potential to yield robust insights into the CEP of resource governance. I show how CEP as a field can benefit from using doubly engaged comparative ethnography as a methodological framework by focusing on the study of unorthodox commons by vulnerable populations. I draw from my research to offer reflections on how a comparative ethnographic approach can be applied and how I have considered the questions posited in the conceptual model to think through the challenges of engaging with communities across different countries in a way that is both empirically robust and respectful of the populations being studied. In doing so, I follow Steinberg and VanDeveer’s suggestion that a doubly engaged social science approach could be valuable and useful for the study of CEP (Steinberg and VanDeveer 2012). The chapter is structured as follows. Following this brief introduction, I describe the theoretical, philosophical, and empirical underpinnings of ethnography and draw on examples

202   Raul Pacheco-Vega from CEP research. The chapter’s third section draws on my research on the governance of bottled water and the comparative politics of informal waste picking at the cross-​national and subnational levels to make explicit how doubly engaged ethnography helps us develop a methodological strategy that improves marginalized and vulnerable populations all the while helping us advance theoretically and empirically in the CEP field. I share some tenets of doubly engaged ethnography and how it inspired my work. I describe the potential rewards, risks, challenges, and opportunities of using ethnography as a method for the study of vulnerable communities and as a strategy to understand cultures embedded in potentially hazardous contexts, both for the researcher and for the populations of interest. I conclude in the fourth section by explaining the potential gains of using ethnography in the CEP context and the challenges of implementing such an approach. I describe the beginnings of a research agenda for CEP scholarship that could potentially use doubly engaged ethnography to compare across cases, time periods, and scales.

Ethnography in Comparative Environmental Politics Ethnography has been around for almost 150 years, and ethnographers have engaged in comparison for decades, even if it hasn’t always been explicit (Small 2009). Anthropology is inherently comparative (Gingrich and Fox 2002), though ethnography is frequently perceived as comparative only when it is multisited (Marcus 1995). Simmons and Smith’s (2019) “comparative ethnography in political science,” sociologists Abramson and Gong (2020), and anthropologists Schnegg and Lowe (2020) brought renewed interest in the method. Ethnographies usually require spending a substantial amount of time in the location of interest, embedded within the community whose culture we are seeking to understand. This understanding of culture also helps us unveil the complex intricacies of the politics of resource management. For example, to study issues of environmental justice in the water field, Hoover embedded herself within Akwesasne, a Mohawk community that shares territory within the Canadian provinces of Ontario and Quebec and New York State, with the goal of understanding and showcasing how the Akwesasne was able to confront the political forces that created hazardous conditions for their survival, given the pollution that was prevalent in the river that went through their territory (Hoover 2017). She was able to engage the local Indigenous communities through her own lived experience but also by using extensive, long-​term fieldwork. To understand how sanitation workers experienced the life of an informal waste picker, Reno engaged in a long-​term ethnography of a landfill in the United States that gave him the opportunity to explore and highlight the inner politics of waste disposal and how governmental actors could enable or preclude informal waste pickers from extracting municipal refuse and make a living out of it (Reno 2016). Using an innovative approach where two authors conducted ethnography using the same research materials and embedding themselves in the same communities in the Mexican Isthmus of Tehuantepec over a 4-​year period (2009–​2013), developing what they call a “duograph,” Howe and Boyer are able to examine the political and ecological elements of wind power

Ethnography in Comparative Environmental Politics    203 development in Southern Mexico (Boyer 2019; Howe 2019). These are just three examples of how ethnography has enormous potential to help us understand comparative environmental political issues.

What Is Ethnography? One of the most interesting questions in the qualitative methods field is the sempiternal inquiry regarding the nature of ethnography as method, as a process, and as practice. Though often cited as the practice of anthropology, it is mostly understood as the study of culture through fieldwork (Clair 2003; Clifford and Marcus 1986; Fayard and Van Maanen 2015; Willis and Trondman 2000). Ethnography can be understood as a qualitative research method that employs fieldwork to understand culture within a community (van Maanen 2011; Smith 2014; Snow et al. 2003). Usually, ethnographic fieldwork is undertaken over an extended period. But debates remain on what fieldwork entails, how we define culture, and to what extent the temporal dimension is relevant. For some authors, “[e]‌thnography is the disciplined and deliberate witness-​cum-​recording of human events” (Willis and Trondman 2000, p. 394). Others consider that it is “a way of writing about and analyzing social life which has roots in both the sciences and the humanities” (Watson 2011, p. 202). While ethnography itself is derived from and most frequently associated with anthropology, other scholars become ethnographers without formal training in anthropology. The field of human geography also privileges ethnography. My own training in political science and human geography included qualitative methods courses, some of which I took in a school of nursing, others in the school of social work, and, finally, a few others within my own academic departments (political science, environmental studies, and human geography). One of the characteristics that makes ethnography unique is a general, explicit understanding of what doing ethnographic work entails. At the same time, that meaning can also be implicit and tacit. Observing members of a particular community within a specific, well-​delimited field over an extended period could be what most scholars who have familiarized themselves with qualitative methods would understand. Given the enormous value of deeply engaging with a local community to understand culture, norms, customs, rules, and institutions, it would follow that fieldwork itself, and ethnography as a systematic approach to engaging in long-​term fieldwork, would help unveil the intricacies of local environmental politics across multiple cases. For example, in her book on Mexican urban water governance, Veronica Herrera explains the inner workings of local water boards across six cities (Herrera 2017b). Systematically examining board composition, activist involvement, and governmental pressures, Herrera showcases how each local context is relevant to the politics of citizen participation. Her field research harnessed 18 months of fieldwork in six cities over four years, where she was deeply embedded in the communities in which she conducted research. Her fluency in the Spanish language was an asset, as was training in qualitative methods. “Ethnography” has become a commonly overused term for a number of anthropologists (Ingold 2014), though definitions still escape researchers from other fields (Hammersley 2017). Debates around what ethnography does and does not usually entail center around the multiple meanings and understandings that scholars give to ethnography. At the core, ethnography is about culture, much in the way that anthropology is the study of culture. One

204   Raul Pacheco-Vega could say that anthropology is the discipline and ethnography is the method. Nevertheless, a few sociologists also claim ethnography as theirs, though others recognize it as a method that is borrowed from their sister discipline (Ladner 2014; Venkatesh 2013).

What Are the Key Elements of Ethnography? I identify four common elements in ethnography: (1) fieldwork, (2) observation, (3) understanding of culture, and (4) temporality. The fifth element, implicit and inherent to discussions of ethnography, is (5) ethics. All these elements are present in CEP in one form or another, but discussing them within the definition of ethnography allows me to emphasize their importance for CEP. It is important to note that not all fieldwork is ethnographic and that ethnography involves a certain degree of long-​term engagement as well as an interest in cultural norms. Fieldwork is a key component of ethnography as it is the work of researchers who venture into the world and attempt to comprehend and understand it “from the inside.” Fieldwork and observation go hand in hand because site choice, locational decision, and options for community under study are all elements that ethnographers need to consider. Where should I undertake fieldwork that enables me to observe the phenomenon I am looking to understand? How can I enter a specific community and travel to a particular site for observation that offers safety for me as researcher and for the community I seek to understand? Fieldwork is a key component in CEP as it allows researchers to understand the socio-​environmental contexts which they seek to study. In her study of Egyptian environmental politics, Sowers undertook extensive fieldwork from the 1990s through 2011 to understand the role of experts and activists in industrial pollution, conservation, and irrigation water management policies. This extensive fieldwork opened up opportunities for the author to understand the realities of each sectoral policy and how different actors engaged in activism across multiple issue areas (Sowers 2014). Long-​term engagement in fieldwork is particularly fruitful in the comparative study of environmental activism, as the work of Hochstetler in Brazil (Hochstetler 2002); Pacheco-​Vega in Canada, the United States, and Mexico (Pacheco-​Vega 2015b); and Sowers in Egypt all have shown. Observation (more specifically, participant observation) is the second key element of ethnographic research. The production of knowledge derived from observing our world through the lenses of each individual researcher is important and often understated. Understanding the culture of a community requires us to observe intimate elements of groups and the multiple contexts within which they operate. Participant observation has the potential to be “revolutionary praxis because it forces us to question our theoretical presuppositions about the world, produce knowledge that is new, was confined to the margins, or was silenced” (Shah 2017, p. 45). Understanding of culture is the third element, an unavoidable prerequisite in any ethnography. We do ethnography because we are interested in understanding the culture of a community, a group of individuals. Language and cultural fluency are fundamental to facilitate communication with interviewees and to function within the community. While it is possible to conduct interviews using a translator, it is fundamental for the researcher to be fluent in the language of the community. While I do not argue that full fluency is necessary

Ethnography in Comparative Environmental Politics    205 before entering the field, acquiring it over the course of the fieldwork would benefit the researcher and the community as trust can be built more easily through communicating in a shared language (Gibb and Iglesias 2017). Obviously, there are additional requirements to robust ethnographic fieldwork than just language fluency to gain a deep understanding of the culture. I argue that long-​term fieldwork does help understand the culture. As an example, Weinthal studied rapid regional environmental cooperation in Central Asian new states (in the Aral Basin) where her fieldwork allowed her to bridge local and international environmental politics through a deep understanding of local cultures and international organizations’ behavior (Weinthal 2002). This cross-​scalar dynamics is often obscured, but lately has taken a more central place in the literature on methods in global environmental governance (O’Neill et al. 2013). Temporality takes a place as the fourth element in the framework that I use to understand and define ethnography, although it is just as important as the other ones. Ethnographic fieldwork is usually perceived as valid whenever the researcher spends an extended period within the community of interest. However, this should not be a determinant of whether ethnography is well done or not. Rapid ethnographic assessments (RAEs) are quick engagements with the local community that can yield just about the same degree of intimate knowledge and understanding as long-​term ethnography. How long are we required to be in the field for our ethnographic work to be considered legitimate and rigorous? Can we enter the field and remain within its confines for a short period of time, and will our insights be compromised, or will they be considered suspect because of the short duration of the fieldwork? These are important questions around temporality. But, even more importantly, temporality is relevant because the way in which we examine, investigate, and comprehend a community will change over time. Therefore, sometimes doing an ethnography in say, 2013, will not look the same as in 2019. Longitudinal ethnography—​that is, ethnographic engagement with the community under study over a long period of time undertaking extensive and intensive fieldwork—​can yield numerous benefits for scholars of CEP. As just one example, Kidwell’s mapping of religious environmental groups is the result of 5 years of fieldwork following British Christian religious movements with an environmental focus (Kidwell 2020). Margaret Keck’s understanding of Brazilian environmental politics has been the result of extensive, long-​term, engaged fieldwork in the country (Abers and Keck 2006, 2013; Keck 1995). Ethics is the fifth element that characterizes ethnography. Discussions around the ethics of ethnography have usually focused on the compromises that researchers need to take when undertaking fieldwork (Cassell 1980; Fetterman 1986; Fine 1994; Iphofen 2011; Li 2015). Important issues that need to be considered in any research design that purports to engage in the study of a community or group for an extended period not only relate to execution of the study on the field but also to the ethical decision-​making involved in deciding which communities and/​or groups (or individuals) are the object/​subject of our studies. As indicated by Corson and co-​authors, “ethnographic case studies offer windows into constitutive processes” (Corson et al. 2014). While their work examines a particular form of ethnographic engagement, collaborative event ethnography (CEE), and applies it to research that focuses on processes within specific international environmental meetings, CEE still requires a profound examination of the ethical considerations of who we are studying and whether their positionality is aligned at the same level or not. Some ethnographies can study elite environmental actors (such as governmental leaders or well-​positioned activists), and

206   Raul Pacheco-Vega others can focus on marginalized communities facing environmental injustices. Therefore, it is important to engage in very careful ethical considerations. All five elements are interconnected and dependent on one another, and all are relevant for CEP. For every research project we design and implement, we must engage in self-​ reflection to try to discern the ethical challenges that undertaking these investigations will posit and the potential risks and dangers for the community and even for the research. The observational component will be present regardless of whether the field is the Internet or a physical space. Recent innovations in the application of ethnography to CEP include the study of international environmental negotiations as sites of research (O’Neill and Haas 2019) and CEE for the study of global environmental politics (Campbell et al. 2014). These specific applications of ethnography involve multiple researchers spending intense, yet short periods of time, sustained over a longer period. In particular, the work of Marion Suiseeya, Hagerman, et al. at the Conferences of the Parties to the Convention of Biological Diversity offer extremely interesting insights. These approaches, like RAEs, help position researchers well for continued engagement that helps us understand the dynamics of international environmental negotiations beyond case studies. Multisited ethnographies across the globe and ethnographic assessments of global environmental negotiations are entirely different and require methodological refinements that differ from those that are specific to comparative ethnography. For example, when Simpson conducted fieldwork for his study on energy, governance, and security in Thailand and Myanmar, his approach was to engage in comparative ethnography across two different countries quasi-​simultaneously (but still in sequence) in order to better understand activist strategies toward gas projects (Simpson 2014). Ethnographic studies of international climate negotiations, for example, can be conducted at the same time as there are multiple researchers who can observe the same negotiation table simultaneously. The kinds of environmental problems and damages that we might be interested in understanding may pose risks for fieldwork engagement, for a broad variety of reasons: researchers’ health, communities’ well-​being, and the safety of both. As several chapters of this Handbook suggest, linkages between ethics, environmental justice, environmental health, and risk are many (e.g., see Fuentes-​George, Marion Suiseeya, Kashwan, and Sultana, in this volume), and, in this chapter, I want to highlight the importance of undertaking ethnographic work for CEP that can reveal potential environmental inequities as well as the multiple ways in which environmental risk can be present across different cases. There are various types of risks and challenges of ethnographic research (for the researcher and for the populations of interest) in any comparative ethnography, regardless of whether it includes more than one case. Ethics is a core consideration of fieldwork, not only from the perspective of the community but also of the researcher. Which issues and communities are we interested in, and should we be allowed to enter these groups’ locations? What we may see as an issue worthy of ethnographic fieldwork-​based research may not be ethically sound to study. Doing fieldwork in “Cancer Alley,” in Louisiana (USA), Thom Davies explored the slow violence that toxic emissions associated with petrochemical infrastructure might have posited for residents of the communities around Cancer Alley

Ethnography in Comparative Environmental Politics    207 (Davies 2019). In undertaking this kind of research, Davies faced risk to his own health, which is also an important consideration. Table 11.1 presents a simple layout that describes a few research considerations for scholars to think about when engaging in comparative ethnography for CEP and suggests a few questions that researchers can and may want to ask themselves during the research design stage. Table 11.1 Relevant research considerations that should inform comparative

ethnography approaches in comparative environmental politics framework Component

Definition

Questions to ask

Positionality

The position that the researcher has with respect to their community of interest

Where are the power imbalances, and are those equally distributed across different communities under study?

Reflexivity

The reflection process that a researcher undertakes to examine their positionality with regards to subjects and/​or research topic

How does my position affect the design and outcomes of my research project, and how does it affect those I am interested in understanding?

Insider-​outsider representation (engagement)

The degree to which the researcher takes over representation of the community under observation

Am I usurping the community members’ voice?

Representativeness of the case study

The extent to which chosen case studies offer a clear depiction of the communities of interest

Did I choose the right cases to explain the variation I am seeking to explain?

Comparability

The degree to which different cases can be compared

How similar or different are the cases of interest in the variables I am seeking to explore or research questions I am considering?

Risk management

The array of issues that could potentially arise for researchers and communities

Is this a research project that might endanger the researcher or the community?

Care for community

The strategies needed to ensure the community risk is minimized

What types of strategies can be implemented, and what is the time horizon on each of these? Should this project be undertaken, and, if so, how?

Researcher self-​care

The toolkit that every researcher will need to explore and develop to deal with challenging subjects and circumstances

What types of materials, resources, techniques, and strategies can a researcher peruse to ensure that the research project takes a minimal toll if any?

Source: Author’s own construction based on review of the literature.

208   Raul Pacheco-Vega

The Comparative Politics of Water Governance and Waste Management Ethnographic fieldwork is valuable for CEP not only because it provides researchers with in-​depth understanding of the community and sites where their research is conducted, but also because it reveals the inner workings of culture, rules, norms, institutions, and customs. In this section, I describe how I used ethnography in my research on bottled water consumption and informal waste picking and describe the decisions I made to bring this research to fruition. I use the following four questions to structure this section: (1) what the research problem was, (2) how I designed the research to undertake comparative ethnography, (3) what types of decisions I made as I conducted the research, and (4) what I found and (5) how ethnography was valuable to me and why didn’t I use other methods to undertake this research. My research has been inherently comparative, by design. Earlier work examined the comparative politics of information dissemination about pollutant emissions across North America (Pacheco-​Vega 2005), whereas more recent research has examined national and subnational public policies toward municipal waste management and drinking water governance in Mexico (Pacheco-​Vega 2018) and North America. Studying water conflict emergence and decline across different locations within Mexico (Pacheco-​Vega 2020b) and investigating the governance of bottled water in France, Mexico, and Spain (Pacheco-​Vega 2019) allowed me to test multiple variants of multisited ethnographic methods. The two vignettes I present here discuss the research design underlying two projects I conducted from 2012 through 2019.

Case Study 1:  The Comparative Politics of Bottled Water Consumption In many countries, consumption of tap water has been shrinking over the years, whereas bottled water has steadily risen in market share. There are multiple reasons for this phenomenon, but previous research points to poor infrastructure (Prasetiawan et al. 2017); the formation of new, emerging markets for packaged liquids (Hawkins 2017); strong marketing campaigns (Brei 2017); and institutionally weak regulatory regimes (Pacheco-​Vega 2019). Though water is considered a human right (Sultana and Loftus 2015, also see Sultana, this volume), there is also profound inequality in how this vital liquid is distributed across the globe. The global bottled water industry contributes to this environmental injustice. From a political perspective, companies that package water sustain enormous economic and political power. In Mexico, for example, a former Coca-​Cola executive (Vicente Fox Quesada) was able to become President of the country. During his tenure, bottled water and soft drinks consumption grew 100% over 6 years (Pacheco-​Vega 2020c). The combined economic power of multinational corporations and simultaneous infrastructure decay in cities across the world has sustained this industry and made it a US$210 billion business. Thus, studying the comparative politics of bottled water consumption clearly became a worthy research endeavor.

Ethnography in Comparative Environmental Politics    209 Previously, researchers on bottled water had been using official statistics to try to understand the global and local consumption dynamics. My research approach combined quantitative methods based on official surveys, but also qualitative ones. I chose ethnographic fieldwork because I wanted to understand the types of decisions that individuals made to consume bottled water even in the face of information about the fact that sometimes that packaged liquid is, in fact, tap water. While we can and often do run surveys on reasons why bottled water is being consumed, these data are not readily available as they are run by market research firms that sell this information for thousands of dollars. Logistically, only an ethnographic approach (or a smaller scale survey) would have made sense considering the type of expense that would be necessary to purchase reports on bottled water consumption and industrial market structure. The global bottled water market was expected to reach about US$273 billion in 2020.1 If individuals were informed about how water was a human right, I would have expected them to oppose bottled water consumption. However, when I conducted preliminary fieldwork in France and Italy in 2014, I found multiple instances of people who were proud of selling their water. Interviewees thought it was a good idea for their countries to package their water and sell it abroad. Moreover, they consumed bottled water despite knowing that their tap water was perfectly safe to drink. Earlier survey work on bottled water that included both of these countries (Doria et al. 2009; Johnstone and Serret 2012) had pointed to poor infrastructure as the main rationale for individuals’ bottled water consumption. This research, however, did not explain why citizens of these countries would support bottled water as a viable and worthy business, and why they continued to consume it despite their solid infrastructure. Brei’s reliance on survey data for France made him infer that the reason why French bottled water companies were so popular, even among French individuals, was their marketing campaigns. Clearly, robust marketing campaigns do have a substantive role to play, particularly to make individuals perceive bottled water as safer than tap water (Merkel et al. 2012; Pierce and Gonzalez 2017; Ragusa and Crampton 2016). But good marketing by itself is not enough as an explanatory factor to help us understand the popularity of bottled water, particularly in contexts where tap water has been demonstrated to be safe, as is the case in Paris. Whereas in Mexican cities there is substantive mistrust about the quality of piped network infrastructure, French urban contexts do not have the same degree of infrastructural weakness. This puzzle made me wonder what type of research design I would need to be able to understand French citizens’ decision-​making processes. Ethnographic fieldwork seemed to make the most sense. I sought to understand the political, public policy, and socio-​anthropological elements underlying sustained growth in consumption of packaged liquids in both countries. I decided that the best way to understand how much bottled water French individuals consumed would be to immerse myself in the society I was seeking to understand. I did the same in Mexico for the sake of having additional case studies for comparison, though CEP does not necessarily need more than one case: it can be studied by looking at a single country, city, or region with a comparative perspective. In this vignette I only focus on bottled water consumption in France, though I conducted fieldwork in Italy, Spain, and Mexico, too. Ethnography was the method that made the most sense given that I sought to understand bottled water consumption patterns and the ideology driving this phenomenon. While there is some work on the growth of bottled water consumption in France (Brei 2017), there was/​is no ethnographic engagement with French residents. Thus, I embarked

210   Raul Pacheco-Vega in field research starting in 2014 and extending it over a sabbatical period in 2019. During that period, I lived in Malakoff, a small suburb located in the banlieue of Paris. Over the course of 5 months, I observed Parisians’ attitudes and their patterns of acquisition and consumption of bottled water. I spent hours sitting in meetings, cafes, and parks, and observing how individuals satisfied their drinking water demands. I also arranged interviews with the local government water agency, Eau de Paris, to better understand the city’s drinking water system. I also interviewed 15 experts on urban water governance in France. I conducted all interviews in French. As for my ethnographic fieldwork, I took detailed notes of my observations in my fieldwork notebook, then transcribed my interviews and fieldnotes and coded them using a grounded theory approach, although informed by the theoretical propositions that I had derived from the literature. Each interview lasted from 1 hour to 3 hours, and I conducted random and purposeful sampling across a sample of residents of Paris as well as those residing in my neighborhood in Malakoff. Over the course of my fieldwork, I found very little usage of water fountains, which is interesting given that Parisians can access an actual map of all the water fountains throughout the Ile de France. Most people I interviewed had decided to consume bottled water despite knowing that they were able to drink from any of the Parisian water fountains because they preferred the taste and the brand. This sentiment mirrors research in the United States that states that some bottled water drinkers prefer to drink from a bottle because of a notion of purity (Bray 2017; Geissler and Gamble 2002), but also because of taste (Biro 2019). When I coded my interviews (using the software MAXQDA), doing initial and purposeful coding, I found themes that centered around “purity” for consumers, as well as “pride,” which I associated with bottled water branding. Historical research on the emergence of bottled water in European cities points to an interesting paradox relevant to my ethnographic findings. Medicinal baths were intended to be accessed only by members of the bourgeoisie (Ahn 2007; Duncan 2010; Miller 2015; Salzman 2012). Therefore, bottling water became a mode of democratization of water access. Whereas now bottling water is perceived as perpetuating environmental injustices and denying people from being able to enact their human right to water, in previous centuries bottling medicinal water available in the baths facilitated access by the populace. However, with the emergence of bottled water as a branded, bourgeois business in France (Wateau 2015) that only the cosmopolitan were able to access, consuming bottled water became a marker of high class. This finding is consistent with results from my participant observation and from interviews I conducted in Paris. This branding approach functions well for other types of brands, such as Fiji Water (Kaplan 2007; Reddy and Singh 2010). While my ethnographic fieldwork in Paris confirmed Brie’s point about the value of a marketing campaign to push sales upward, I would not have been able to learn about the motivations for Parisians to support the sale of their water abroad had I not embedded myself in the city. Perrier and Evian are two of the most popular brands of bottled water in the global market. Moreover, ethnography gave me an opportunity to better understand the culture associated with bottled water consumption and production, simultaneously. For comparative purposes, I also conducted the same type of ethnographic fieldwork in two Mexican cities, though I do not report on these in this chapter due to space limitations.

Ethnography in Comparative Environmental Politics    211

Case Study 2:  The Comparative Politics of Informal Waste Picking Waste is accumulating all over the world at alarming rates (O’Neill et al. 2018, 2019). Despite technological advances, societies continue to produce discards at a much more rapid pace than what is possible to treat. Traditionally, waste treatment systems have been formalized across all stages of production, collection, transportation, disposal, and/​or treatment. Nevertheless, informal waste picking as an economic practice for survival has been growing steadily over the past few decades, too (Dias 2016; Gutberlet 2012; Hartmann 2012). Understanding how interactions between government agencies in charge of waste and discards operate and interact with informal recyclers and the underlying political and policy processes is important to design better waste policies. I became interested in this topic because of my earlier comparative work on information-​based environmental policy instruments and their potential for voluntary disclosure of pollutant releases by chemical plants, which I briefly outline here. Regulating waste, toxics, and discards seems counterproductive because of the alleged decline in technological innovation. Voluntary and information-​dissemination policy instruments emerged as a response to traditional command-​and-​control, regulatory programs (Antweiler and Harrison 2007; Harrison 1998; Pacheco-​Vega 2020a). Comparatively speaking, Canada and the United States were the first ones to advance in the development of a mandatory pollutant release and transfer registry (PRTR), with the United States taking the lead with the Toxics Release Inventory (TRI) and Canada following suit with the National Pollutant Release Inventory (NPRI). Mexico’s Registro de Emisiones y Transferencia de Contaminantes (RETC) emerged in 1999, whereas the TRI was launched in 1986 and the NPRI in 1993 (Antweiler and Harrison 2003; Pacheco-​Vega 2001). While both NPRI and RETC followed the lead of TRI, RETC followed the lead of TRI but was also the result of a push by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) to implement PRTRs in developing countries and emerging economies. Undertaking this traditional, comparative case study (Bartlett and Vavrus 2017, 2018) analysis led me to consider the importance of studying other forms of waste governance. A lateral move from studies of the governance of toxics took me to studying subnational waste governance systems, particularly focusing on the interaction between municipal governments and their informal recycling communities. I started studying informal waste picking because of my interest in informal and formal rules and my previous work based on the Ostrom Workshop/​Bloomington School literature (McKean 2000; Ostrom 1990, 2013; Ostrom et al. 1992; Pacheco-​Vega 2015a). A large portion of the institutional analysis scholarship examines rules and norms, both formal and informal, that govern interactions between actors. These institutions provide stability and certainty across different scales for resource governance. How is waste governed, and what are the various possibilities that open when we expand our understanding of rules from simply regulatory schemes for waste disposal to a broader range of tools that involve nonformalized actors in the discards system? My quest to answer this research question led me to study the relationships between informal recyclers and the governments with which they interact. For me, the research problem was easy to identify: What types of interactions between local governments and their informal waste pickers

212   Raul Pacheco-Vega yield the best working conditions for these recyclers? This is a CEP question, much like the previous one I described in this chapter, because an important component of the politics of informal waste picking centers around the potential conflict or cooperation that can emerge from powerful actors (local governments) and less strong agents (informal waste pickers). A review of the literature yields interesting insights on the individual actions of waste recyclers working in the informal economy across multiple jurisdictions, including Brazil (Coletto and Bisschop 2017; Tarumã and Sampaio 2009), Argentina (Rubio Campos 2015), Nicaragua (Hartmann 2018), Ghana (Oteng-​Ababio 2011), and China (Orlins and Guan 2015) but offers very little if any explanation for the spectrum of relationships alongside the conflict–​cooperation continuum. I was interested in understanding both conflict and cooperation in waste recycling at the city level and, for that reason, decided to conduct a comparative ethnography in two Mexican cities (León and Aguascalientes, in central Mexico), and two European cities (Paris in France and Madrid in Spain). The paired comparison works well because in León and Madrid I found a confrontational relationship between the local governments and informal recyclers, whereas in Paris and Aguascalientes I found a much more cooperative one. This was a risky proposition because I did not anticipate that I would find a French city where the relationship between informal recyclers and its municipal government were cooperative. From earlier fieldwork and my understanding of the literature, I knew that the city of Vancouver, in British Columbia, Canada, had a clearly cooperative relationship with its informal recycler community (Wittmer and Parizeau 2018). Moreover, I had already conducted fieldwork in León and Aguascalientes for my bottled water project, and it was relatively easy to dovetail and spend additional time investigating informal waste picking. I have fluency in the Spanish language, and my work with municipal water management had given me the opportunity to contact regulators in the waste sector relatively easily. I also had a collaborative relationship with city regulators in Paris and experts on resource governance that could help me with contacts in the city for the waste sector. Furthermore, from a governance perspective, the French companies that operated the local water services within the metropolitan area of Paris (the banlieue) also operated waste collection, transportation, and disposal (Suez Environnement and Veolia, at the time in which I conducted fieldwork). I began with preliminary ethnographic fieldwork in León and Aguascalientes in mid-​ 2012, to try to get a sense for the types of interactions I could expect between informal waste pickers and their local governments. My research design was informed by previous scholarship on informal waste picking that was primarily fieldwork-​based in nature (Gowan 2009; Gutberlet 2008; Siddarth et al. 2010). My research design required special consideration of the ethics as I was intending to conduct ethnographies of both marginalized communities and government officials, who usually are considered elites. Interviewing governmental actors would be considered relatively less problematic regarding protection of their rights because, normally, institutional review boards (IRBs) would clear the researcher from having to anonymize or, at least, would provide clearance to conduct the interview with fewer hurdles. On the contrary, ethnography of marginalized populations requires deep reflection from the researchers on protective measures and considerations to minimize impact on the population under study (Behar 1996; Librett and Perrone 2010; Zavisca 2007). I designed my research protocol following the Canadian Tri-​Council Guidelines for Research with Human Subjects and taking into consideration Pacheco-​Vega and Parizeau’s conceptual model to potentially minimize risks to subjects.

Ethnography in Comparative Environmental Politics    213 I embedded myself in landfills in León and Aguascalientes, visiting on a regular basis and requesting access from the local authorities, as well as gaining the trust of landfill workers and informal recyclers who conducted their work there. It is important to note that over the course of the first few months of fieldwork I realized substantive differences between informal waste picking practices in both cities. Over the course of my ethnographic fieldwork in both cities, I found that whereas in Aguascalientes most recyclers would access municipal refuse from neighborhood containers, in León informal waste pickers roamed the streets at night to ensure collection and sorting before the trash collection trucks would arrive (Pacheco-​Vega 2021). I collected fieldnotes and anonymized them to preserve research participants’ confidentiality across the board. From my fieldwork across the two Mexican cities, I used lessons learned to design how I would conduct fieldwork in Madrid (Spain) and Paris (France). This is an important lesson for those interested in comparative ethnography for CEP: because qualitative research is inductive in nature (Bernard et al. 2017), lessons drawn from other case studies are helpful as we expand the scope of the research and increase the number of cases (Bartlett 2007; Brewis et al. 2019; Schnegg and Lowe 2020). To expand my research on informal waste pickers to European cities, I conducted online searches in newspapers in Spanish (Madrid) and French (Paris) to be able to discern from news articles the kind of relationship that local governments would have with their informal recycling communities. I conducted preliminary fieldwork in both cities in late 2014, trying to identify the main actors in government across all levels (national, regional, municipal, and metropolitan). My main ethical concern resided with the potential damage that talking to me would do to the already tenuous relationship that informal recyclers had with the governments of Madrid and León. Studying highly vulnerable populations is quite fraught and requires serious thinking and asking questions about what we can do to mitigate potential damages, protect our informants, and ensure that the inequality gap is narrowed (Hill 1995; Kendrick et al. 2008; Vanderstaay 2005). I thus decided to engage in relatively covert fieldwork in both cities, observing more than interviewing or talking. I observed informal waste picking practices in downtown Madrid and Paris for a month at a time, returning to the field in 2016 and 2019. This longitudinal approach allowed me to observe how cardboard recycling (the main activity for informal waste pickers in both cities) practices changed over time. I talked to recyclers, interviewed experts and government actors, and systematically collected news items across both cases as well. My research design focused on explaining how variation in cooperation or conflict between local governments and informal recyclers impacted the latter. Through the four comparative case studies, I found that in instances where cooperation was clearer (Aguascalientes and Paris), informal recyclers appeared to have better working conditions, whereas where conflict was more apparent (Madrid and León), waste pickers seemed to face more precariousness. Because my interest was not only on informal waste picking practices and culture, but also on interactions between powerful and marginalized actors, ethnography yielded valuable research insights, not only in terms of CEP, but also regarding research projects’ design and implementation. For a comparative research design to examine more than two outcomes, we need at least three cases (presence, absence, and a contrasting case). In the case of my comparative politics of informal waste picking project, I conducted fieldwork in 13 cities across eight countries in five languages. Methodologically speaking, I designed my project so that I could undertake fieldwork in several sites to examine a broader range of interactions

214   Raul Pacheco-Vega between municipal governments and waste pickers. My research design ensured that the analysis of the variation across cases (a key tenet of comparative methods) was not solely dichotomic (i.e., whether there is presence or absence of collaboration). I do not report on the other cases in this chapter for space constraint reasons. Nevertheless, the experience of conducting comparative ethnographies to understand the politics of informal waste pickers across multiple cities, languages, and countries enabled me to regain an appreciation for how complex yet rewarding ethnography can be and how useful it could be for comparative environmental politics.

Conclusion: Toward a Research Agenda on Ethnographic Approaches to CEP Ethnography is a powerful research method based on the systematic, repeated, and extended observation of a population within a community. Ethnography-​based research enables the understanding of culture within organizations and/​or communities. Ethnographic fieldwork holds much promise for CEP, particularly for the study of social and political phenomena associated with resource governance, pollution, and ecosystem degradation. Ethnography also holds much promise to help us understand how different actors engage in environmentally focused negotiations, at both the local and international levels. Finally, ethnography can be useful to discern instances of resource-​based conflict and/​or collaboration and how to better design environmental policies to tackle these challenges. My goal for this chapter was to highlight the importance and value of ethnography as a method for CEP. Throughout the chapter, I offered multiple examples of how ethnography has empowered researchers to understand the politics of the environment from a comparative approach and how its usage could be even more fruitful for CEP researchers, from in-​depth studies of conservation in the Amazonian region (Kawa 2016) to CEE research focusing on the Conferences of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (Campbell et al. 2014). I suggested a few elements worth considering when discerning whether to apply this methodological strategy. Specifically, I suggest that ethnography can be useful to help uncover the inner workings of the conflict–​collaboration spectra of relationships across different types of actors. I shared two vignettes that draw on my cumulative work on the comparative governance of bottled water in Europe and Mexico and on the comparative politics of government–​informal waste picker interactions across multiple countries in Europe and North America. These vignettes speak to the overall decision-​making process that researchers need to engage in while designing CEP research projects. It is important to emphasize that no one unique methodological framework will unify insights from different case studies. There are questions that are better investigated using quantitative methodologies, or spatial analysis, or social network analysis. The types of inquiries that an ethnographic approach can help answer require intense engagement with the community in the case and location under study. It is therefore important for researchers to understand their research goal. It is also fundamental that scholars validate their choice of research method and evaluate its appropriateness for the specific research question they

Ethnography in Comparative Environmental Politics    215 are trying to answer. Instead of choosing a research methodology and applying it to a specific case study, investigators should instead determine which methodological and empirical strategies will best fit their research purposes and whether they are appropriate for the specific research question they are interested in investigating. My core point is that scholars should not necessarily avoid embarking on a doubly engaged comparative ethnographical research project. Instead, I argue that should researchers choose to do doubly engaged ethnography, they ought to be fully aware of the implications, assumptions, and responsibilities associated with this methodological approach. One of the main advantages of using ethnography, for research broadly but for CEP more specifically, is that its usage enables researchers to investigate the cultural components that permeate a community, a society, or a group of individuals. Ethnography’s potential for multiscale, multigroup, multisited fieldwork facilitates the absorption of information and facilitates an understanding of a group in a profound way. Critics of ethnography have challenged the external validity of the method (LeCompte and Goetz 1982) as well as the apparent lack of systematicity and rigor (Smith 1998) and the complex decision-​making processes revolving around and having to deal with transparency in data collection, systematization, analysis, and reporting. Should ethnographers allow other researchers to directly examine their field notes, fieldwork notebooks, and interviews? What are the rules and limitations of transparency in qualitative research, and how should they be adapted to ethnographic work? Where do we go from here? The biggest challenge will be dealing with issues of data transparency, confidentiality, and protection of vulnerable communities. These questions must be dealt with at the research design stage but should also remain a key concern throughout the project implementation and evaluation. There is much talk about potentially increasing transparency in qualitative research such as the Qualitative Transparency Deliberations project that took place from 2015 through 2021 (Jacobs et al. 2021) as well as making replicability and reproducibility an important concern for qualitative researchers (Aguinis and Solarino 2019; Bakken 2019). In my view, these are important considerations but never more important than ethical behavior toward marginalized communities. Given the potential for ethnography to uncover issues of environmental injustice, there will be ample opportunities for its application using ethical approaches that protect marginalized and vulnerable communities.

Note 1. See https://​www.stati​sta.com/​outl​ook/​20010​000/​100/​bott​led-​water/​worldw​ide#:~:text=​ Reve​nue%20in%20the%20Bott​led%20Wa​ter,US%2461%2C0​76m%20in%202​020).

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220   Raul Pacheco-Vega Pacheco-​ Vega, Raul. “Non-​ State Actors and Environmental Policy Change in North America: A Case Study of the Registro de Emisiones y Transferencia de Contaminantes (RETC) in Mexico.” In Proceedings of the 2001 Berlin Conference on the Human Dimensions of Global Environmental Change “Global Environmental Change and the Nation State,” edited by Frank Biermann, Rainer Brohm, and Klaus Dingwerth, 352–​359. Potsdam, DE: Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, 2001. Pacheco-​Vega, Raul. “Democracy by Proxy: Environmental NGOs and Policy Change in Mexico.” In Environmental Issues in Latin America and the Caribbean, edited by Aldemaro Romero and Sarah West, 231–​249. Dordrecht: Springer Verlag, 2005. Pacheco-​Vega, Raul. River Basin Councils as Action Arenas: Analyzing Rules and Norms in the Lerma-​Chapala River Basin Council Using the IAD Framework. Bloomington, IN: Ostrom Workshop on Political Theory and Policy Analysis, 2015a. Pacheco-​Vega, Raul. “Transnational Environmental Activism in North America: Wielding Soft Power Through Knowledge Sharing?” Review of Policy Research 32, no. 1 (2015b): 146–​162. 10.1111/​ropr.12111%5Cnhttp://​sea​rch.ebscoh​ost.com/​login.aspx?dir​ect=​true&db=​bth&AN=​ 100299​559&site=​ehost-​live. Pacheco-​ Vega, Raul. “Policy Styles in Mexico: Still Muddling Through Centralized Bureaucracy, Not yet Through the Democrati.” In Policy Styles and Policy-​Making, edited by Jale Tosun and Michael Howlett, 89–​112. Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2018. Pacheco-​Vega, Raul. “(Re)Theorizing the Politics of Bottled Water: Water Insecurity in the Context of Weak Regulatory Regimes.” Water 11, no. 4 (2019): 658–​684. https://​www.mdpi. com/​2073-​4441/​11/​4/​658. Pacheco-​Vega, Raul. “Environmental Regulation, Governance, and Policy Instruments, 20 Years after the Stick, Carrot, and Sermon Typology.” Journal of Environmental Policy and Planning 22, no. 5 (2020a): 1–​16. https://​doi.org/​10.1080/​15239​08X.2020.1792​862. Pacheco-​Vega, Raul. “Governing Urban Water Conflict Through Watershed Councils: A Public Policy Analysis Approach and Critique.” Water 12, no. 1849 (2020b): 1–​26. Pacheco-​Vega, Raul. “Human Right to Water and Bottled Water Consumption: Governing at the Intersection of Water Justice, Rights, and Ethics.” In Water Politics: Governance, Rights, and Justice, edited by Farhana Sultana and Alexander J. Loftus, 113–​128. London: Routledge, 2020c. Pacheco-​Vega, Raul. “Comparative Methods for the Study of Waste.” In The Routledge Handbook of Waste Studies, edited by Zsuzsa Gille and Josh Lepawsky, 121–​138. London and New York: Routledge, 2021. Pacheco-​ Vega, Raul, and Kate Parizeau. “Doubly-​ Engaged Ethnography: Opportunities and Challenges When Working with Vulnerable Communities.” International Journal of Qualitative Methods 17, no. 1 (2018): 1–​13. Pierce, Gregory, and Silvia Gonzalez. “Mistrust at the Tap? Factors Contributing to Public Drinking Water (Mis)Perception across US Households.” Water Policy 19, no. 1 (2017): 1–​12. Prasetiawan, Teddy, Anindrya Nastiti, and Barti Setiani Muntalif. “ ‘Bad’ Piped Water and Other Perceptual Drivers of Bottled Water Consumption in Indonesia.” Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Water 4, no. 4 (2017): e1219. http://​doi.wiley.com/​10.1002/​wat2.1219. Ragusa, Angela T., and Andrea Crampton. “To Buy or Not to Buy? Perceptions of Bottled Drinking Water in Australia and New Zealand.” Human Ecology 44, no. 5 (2016): 565–​576. http://​dx.doi.org/​10.1007/​s10​745-​016-​9845-​6. Reddy, Mahendra, and Gurmeet Singh. “Branding of Fiji’s Bottled Water: Edging into Sustainable Consumption.” International Journal of Entrepreneurship and Small Business 9, no. 4 (2010): 447–​462.

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222   Raul Pacheco-Vega Watson, Tony J. “Ethnography, Reality, and Truth: The Vital Need for Studies of ‘How Things Work’ in Organizations and Management.” Journal of Management Studies 48, no. 1 (2011): 202–​217. Weinthal, Erika. State Making and Environmental Cooperation. Linking Domestic and International Politics in Central Asia. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002. Willis, Paul, and Mats Trondman. “Manifesto for Ethnography.” Ethnography 1, no. 1 (2000): 5–​16. Wittmer, Josie, and Kate Parizeau. “Informal Recyclers’ Health Inequities in Vancouver, BC.” New Solutions, 2018: 104829111877784. http://​journ​als.sage​pub.com/​doi/​10.1177/​10482​9111​ 8777​845. Zavisca, Jane. “Ethics in Ethnographic Fieldwork.” Forum for Anthropology and Culture (2007): Vol 4, Issue 1, 127–​ 146. http://​anthro​polo​gie.kuns​tkam​era.ru/​files/​pdf/​eng​004/​ eng4_​zavi​sca.pdf.

Chapter 12

An Intersec t i ona l E x pl oration of C l i mat e Institu ti ons Annica Kronsell, Gunnhildur Lily Magnusdottir, Nanna Rask, and Benedict E. Singleton Introduction Climate change is one of the main challenges of the 21st century and a growing concern among politicians, publics, businesses, and citizens across the globe. Climate objectives agreed upon globally, nationally, and locally require substantial changes in many sectors and broad societal engagement. Governing bodies at different levels are authoritative key actors in this endeavor. However, these governing bodies have largely failed to acknowledge that issues of climate change are not merely “environmental” problems that require “technological” or “economical” solutions, but that they indeed are social issues. The underlying causes of climate change, as well as the suggested solutions and climate policies, are embedded and entangled in unequal power structures, relationships, and practices. Sustainable transformations require a restructuring of societal relations. Thus, in order to deal with climate change we also need to deal with issues of power, equality, and justice. We start our discussion by addressing the following questions: Why have governmental bodies and other climate actors failed to fully recognize equity and climate justice? And, how can they improve and start to engage with issues of power and justice? In this chapter, our focus is state-​centric, as we claim that governmental institutions are primary actors in climate policy-​making. States hold the resources and policy-​making powers needed to develop sustainable climate policies at the state level, stemming from global climate policy-​making and with significant effects on local and regional levels (Bäckstrand and Kronsell 2015). Here, we focus on climate institutions, meaning government agencies or policy-​making bodies charged with the realization of climate objectives. Such institutions, as for example the transport and energy agencies as well as climate and environmental agencies, usually deal with sectors that generate high levels of carbon

224    Annica KronseLl et al. emissions. It is, however, necessary to go beyond those traditionally defined “environmental” agencies and sectors of transport and energy and include sectors such as industry, city planning, and agriculture and land use, as well as production, consumption, and sustainable behavior change—​where activities that lead to carbon emissions occur and where climate change adaptation and mitigation measures are put in place. We argue that climate institutions have failed to create effective, legitimate, democratic, and just policies due to the lack of attention to power relations and how these are reflected and acted upon in climate institutions (Alber, Cahoon, and Röhr 2017; Alston 2014; Magnusdottir and Kronsell 2015, 2021). This manifests in an emphasis on technological innovations and economic incentives with concomitant inattention to social dimensions (Boström 2012), effectively excluding concerns for equity, equality, and justice. This is highly problematic in light of research that stresses the importance of social inclusion to achieving a climate transition in line with current sustainability goals (cf. Alber et al. 2017; Buckingham and Le Masson 2017; Reed 2017; Uteng, Rømer Christensen, and Levin 2020) to which most governments have committed themselves. Consequently, climate institutions in the Global North need to broaden their approach to include equity, equality, and justice issues in their policy-​making. A growing field of research stemming from feminist theory that focuses on intersectionality has much to offer comparative environmental politics. With this chapter, we hope to convince the reader why we believe so. Our perhaps somewhat bold aim is to convey to the reader that our use of intersectionality as an analytical lens can not just contribute to further developing, or “adding,” to the field of comparative studies of climate institutions and policies, but that it is, indeed, also absolutely necessary if we are to better grasp the power relations embedded within these institutions and their effects. The focus of our research is to, with an intersectional lens, analyze how those embedded within climate institutions understand and work with social differences in policy-​making. Our wider project studies four climate institutions in Sweden deemed crucial to the realization of the national climate objectives: the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the Traffic Administration (STA), the Energy Agency (SEA), and the Innovation Agency (VIN). This chapter focuses on the two initial phases of our research project,1 which consists of a text analysis of key policy documents and the analysis of 31 interviews investigating which social issues the policy-​makers2 recognize, how they understand them, and how social issues are addressed in policy-​making. Beyond providing insights into these particular Swedish agencies, the findings from our comparison and analysis of these agencies have relevance for climate institutions elsewhere since climate institutions in the Global North have similar norms and approaches, are often linked to the same global climate agendas, and are often basing their work in similar techno-​economic thinking. For example, transport and energy ministries and agencies across Europe are highly masculinized and have not fully recognized the intersectional nature of climate change or their gendered effects (Alber et al. 2017; Rømer Christensen and Hvidt Breengaard 2021; Singleton and Magnusdottir 2021). Our starting point is in theoretical work that considers institutions as sites of power, where power relations are reproduced through the way they organize issues, set up processes, and the norms they reproduce or challenge in policy-​making. In this, we rely on feminist institutionalism, which claims that policy-​makers within institutions are directed by a gendered logic of appropriateness, which might make the inclusion of gender and other intersecting social factors less appropriate than technical solutions (Palmieri 2020). In the next section,

An Intersectional Exploration of Climate Institutions    225 we turn to intersectionality and develop this institutional approach. First, we use such an intersectional institutional approach as a way to identify the climate-​relevant social factors that can or should be included in climate policy-​making. Second, we use it to critically read and assess the four climate institutions’ policy-​making. Accordingly, it was evident from the texts and interviews that those efforts have, to date, been insufficient and that, even though policy-​makers recognize the relevance of social concerns, it is a challenge to incorporate those concerns concretely within policy-​making. Finally, we discuss our initial findings and draw some conclusions that interpret the responses of the four climate institutions in terms of the powerful effects of institutional path dependencies. We also reflect on future research and ways to move forward in developing decision support and useful tools for policy-​makers based on our findings.

Climate Institutions, Power, and Social Factors “Transformation implies above all a fundamental redistribution and reconfiguration of power structures, and a restructuring of societal relations that produce inequality, oppression and deprivation.” (Castán Broto and Westman 2019, p. 220). Thus, in order to achieve transformative and disruptive change one must reflect on and understand how power relations within institutions are (re)produced. Institutions organize power inequalities in several ways: first, institutions organize power through formal and informal rules and practices. Institutions can be said to consist of the “rules, norms, and practices embedded in historical traditions and legacies, giving some stability and predictability to political and public life” (Hysing and Olsson 2017, p. 9). Power practices enacted over time (e.g., historically derived notions of gender, efficiency, or the growth imperative) become deeply embedded in organizations as they are reinforced over time through daily policy acts (Pierson 2004, p. 11). Second, institutions organize power through the co-​ production of identities, such as gender, which intertwine with the daily life and logic of institutions. While feminist institutionalists have examined this around gender (Krook and Mackay 2011), wider institutional identity formation (e.g., on professional identities) and its effect on institutional practice remain underresearched. Third, the resulting policies, strategies, and actions emerging as the output of climate institutions will, when acted on, (re)produce power relations in society through the distribution of resources, by promoting specific norms, values, and certain types of knowledge (see, e.g., Detraz, in this volume). Thus, the resulting policies will likely benefit some sectors, actors, and groups in particular. Institutions end up with particular “pattern-​bound” effects over time that provide institutional resilience when certain rules and norms of behavior are locked into place (Krook and Mackay 2011; Ljungholm 2017; Thomson 2018; Waylen 2009). Path dependency makes institutions “sticky” and resistant to change, as opportunities for innovation and change are constrained or enabled by previous choices. In line with this, climate institutions can be viewed as path-​dependent when it comes to both the nonrecognition of gender and the nonrepresentation of other intersecting social

226    Annica KronseLl et al. factors, such as class, ethnicity, age, location, and education. One type of path dependence of climate institutions significant to our study is related to how climate change originally emerged on the global agenda as a highly scientific, elitist, technical, and masculinized issue, privileging mainly the natural science community to define the problem as a “scientific” one (Hemmati and Röhr 2009; Skutsch 2000). This has provided a certain “stickiness” in climate institutions, flowing from the global to the national and the local, and thus excluding, downplaying, and making irrelevant social understandings. Other path dependencies are also relevant, such as historical legacies of the institutions often related to their defined tasks. For the STA, this involves making sure that the transport network is effective and accessible to all. For the SEA, this entails assuring access to energy for households and industry. For the EPA, this means being involved in the protection and conservation of nature. Finally, VIN seeks to facilitate an “innovation-​friendly” Swedish society and economy. Why dominant norms retain their power—​why they are so “sticky”—​relates to processes of normalization (Mackay, Kenny, and Chappell 2010). Normalization reproduces power through everyday acts that are perceived as “normal.” March and Olsen (1989, pp. 21–​38, 161) suggest that institutions are reproduced through patterns of action in a “logic of appropriateness.” The logic is that individual policy-​makers follow embedded rules and routines according to what is appropriate for their social and professional role and individual identity. Feminist institutionalists coined the more specific “gendered logic of appropriateness,” which “prescribes (as well as proscribes) ‘acceptable’ masculine and feminine forms of behavior, rules and values for men and women within institutions” (Chappell and Waylen 2013, p. 601) and draws attention to the importance of identity in institutional practices (Thomson 2018). How individuals (e.g., civil servants) give their actions meaning and what they consider appropriate in any given situation is not trivial. “[A]‌ctions are fitted to situations by their appropriateness within a conception of identity” (March and Olsen 1989, p. 38). Accordingly, what climate actions and policies are produced through institutional practices and what aspects, parameters, and issues are taken into account depend on how individual policy-​makers make meaning out of their position and of the expectations on that position. There is ample research that demonstrates that the social dimensions of climate emissions matter. Climate gas emissions, vulnerability to climate impacts, and political participation in climate decisions vary considerably across the population, according to place, gender, race, class, age, and other intersectional factors (Alber et al. 2017, p. 66; Buckingham and Le Masson 2017, p. 3–​5; Djoudi et al. 2016; IPCC 2014; Kaijser and Kronsell 2014; Reed 2017, p. 209). If social differences remain ignored, climate policies risk reinforcing existing inequalities. Thus, they require solving together. Furthermore, by overlooking differential effects, climate policies risk becoming ineffective if, for example, they give rise to protests among groups who feel unjustifiably challenged by climate policies and decisions. This is exemplified to varying degrees by disparate protests and movements such as the yellow vest protests in France, environmental justice movements, and the US and global Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests. The latter two examples have been influential in vocalizing the connections between (in)justice, (in) equalities, and climate change, which has led to several BLM activists to call for a so-​called intersectional environmentalism across social media platforms. In his influential work on critical environmental justice (which is also inspired by intersectionality), David Pellow (cf. 2016, 2018; also in this volume) has revealed the multiple forms of inequality that drive

An Intersectional Exploration of Climate Institutions    227 and shape environmental injustices. Not solely between humans, but also between humans and non-​humans. For example, his analysis of the roles that water, air, land, and non-​humans play in the BLM movement revealed how power flows through a multitude of multispecies relationships on our planet and how these power relations often result in environmental injustices for the marginalized. In other words, there is increased recognition, especially among civil society actors and within academia, that dealing with climate change entails engaging with existing underlying inequalities. These inequalities can be both a cause and an effect of climate change. Thus, social differences need to be recognized as relevant, incorporated, and acted upon within climate institutions and in policy. The UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), also known as the 2030 Agenda, has potential to provide a framework for addressing these concerns, but to date recognition of social difference is limited in most climate policy-​making. Climate institutions have instead emphasized technical innovations and economic incentives as the most important solutions for dealing with climate change (Alber et al. 2017; Alston 2014; Magnusdottir and Kronsell 2015, 2021). Our research focuses on and critically analyzes such climate institutions in the Global North. This focus is warranted since states in the Global North have a particular responsibility to reduce their carbon emissions drastically with increasing urgency (UNFCCC 2015) as they tend to have the most resource-​consuming and polluting corporations, lifestyles, and practices (Elliott 2012). They are comparatively rich states with the resources to drive forward matters of environmental justice and sustainability and could be expected to do so. Previous research on climate institutions in the Global North unfortunately indicates a lack of knowledge among policy-​makers of social difference and (in) equality, such as the diversity of the public, with its manifold needs and behavioral patterns. In particular, this manifests around how to include climate-​relevant social factors within climate objectives, such as in the governmental agencies in the Scandinavian countries and in the EU Commission’s Climate Action Directorate (Allwood 2014, 2021; Buckingham and Le Masson 2017; Magnusdottir and Kronsell 2015, 2016; Singleton et al. 2021). There is thus a need for greater knowledge within climate institutions in the Global North on how to include equity, equality, and justice issues in policy-​making, and they need to find policy measures and institutional tools that can accomplish this.

The Intersectional Approach Intersectionality is a critical approach for addressing social concerns and power relations in climate issues. After a brief introduction to the scholarly origins of intersectionality within feminist theory, we argue for intersectionality’s relevance for understanding the social dimensions of climate institutions and policies. Ecofeminist and feminist political ecology have made important contributions to the topic of gender and the environment since the 1980s. They highlighted the gendered nature of environmental issues and have demonstrated how gender relations affect the natural environment and how environmental issues have a differential impact on women and men (Buckingham-​Hatfield 2000). This means that men and women experience the environment differently, often with different access to and control over ecological systems as a result of their divergent social and cultural roles (Rocheleau et al. 1996). Their research brought

228    Annica KronseLl et al. attention to unacknowledged women’s work that was rendered invisible within mainstream environmental studies (Arora-​Jonsson 2017; MacGregor 2017). The earlier feminist literature, although performing crucial groundwork, focused primarily on gendered inequalities and the environment in environmental development projects, such as forestry, farming, and water development projects, rather than on climate issues. When such studies focused on policy-​making and governance, it was specifically linked to gender, such as the gendered effects of EU labor, agriculture, and development policies (Buckingham-​Hatfield 2000), and it was predominately in the empirical context of development and developing countries. Furthermore, the early scholarship on gender and climate change focused for the most part on women (Dankelman 2002; Mearns and Norton 2010; Terry 2009) by, for example, demonstrating differences between men and women in climate change impacts, highlighting the vulnerability of women in the Global South, and/​or emphasizing women’s specific role in mitigating climate change (cf. Aguilar 2013; Bendlin 2014; Resurrección 2013). Echoing this, the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (cf. IPCC 2014) also noted how rural women in developing countries are among the groups most vulnerable to climate change. While the risks of climate change vary, these studies and reports have highlighted how women are at greater risk, more vulnerable, and more likely to become victims of climate change because they have different access to resources, live under different conditions, and have more restricted capabilities than many men due to different social and cultural rules and norms. In other words, it relates to their place within a gender power order. It is relevant that women’s specific roles, concerns, and livelihoods be taken into account in policy-​making in climate institutions (Alston 2014; Alston and Whittenbury 2013), but the tendency to conceptualize gender in climate change as being only about vulnerable (rural) women or female victims in the Global South is problematic and obscures power relations in a number of ways (Arora-​Jonsson 2011). First, it conceals that gender power issues have relevance for climate actions also in the Global North (Carlsson-​Kanyama et al. 2010; Hiselius Winslott et al. 2019; Kronsell, Smidfelt Rosqvist, and Winslott Hiselius 2016; Polk 2003; Räty and Carlsson-​Kanyama 2009). Second, a focus on women per definition excludes from the analysis both nonbinary people and men and masculinity. This places a heavy burden and responsibility to solve climate change on women and on projects solely focusing on women’s empowerment rather than on, for example, underlying patriarchal structures and masculinity norms (e.g., Hedenqvist et al. 2021; Hultman and Pulé 2018), relevant for the work of climate institutions around the world. Third, the focus on women does not take into account the importance of economic status or class nor does it pay attention to other social differences and categories such as race, sexuality, or age in climate change mitigation and adaptation. Of late, a more nuanced literature is emerging, one that has begun to analyze gender as power relations that are intersecting with other relations and categories (MacGregor 2017; Nagel 2012). Intersectionality demonstrates how important power relations are to climate change issues and the need to highlight how structures of power emerge and interact within climate policy-​making (Kaijser and Kronsell 2014). Intersectionality originated in black feminist critiques of the “color-​blindness” of mainstream feminism (cf. Collins and Bilge 2016; Crenshaw 1989, 1991; Davis 1981; hooks 1981). Within academia, the term is credited to Crenshaw (1989) who has contributed substantially with work on how womens’ experiences are shaped by overlapping patterns of sexism and

An Intersectional Exploration of Climate Institutions    229 racism, which had been missing from both feminism and antiracism academic discourses. Since then, intersectionality has been enriched by insights from various strands of feminist literature. Feminist literature has developed and employed intersectionality as a way to complicate the analysis of gender, arguing that gender seldom stands alone as a power relation. Rather, it is related and connected to other power differences, such as class, ethnicity, sexuality, age, religion, (dis)ability, and place (Cho, Williams Crenshaw, and McCall 2013; Lykke 2010; Moraga and Anzaldúa 1981; Yuval-​Davis 2006). Intersectional insights are employed to question whose voices and what knowledge claims are heard and privileged (Collins and Bilge 2016; Moraga and Anzaldúa 1981) More recently, scholars and activists concerned with climate change and environmental justice issues have become interested in intersectionality, criticizing much previous intersectional work for its lack of attention to the interconnection between human/​society and nature power relations (Kaijser and Kronsell 2014, 2016; Lykke 2009). Moving intersectionality’s focus from solely identity to a systemic level has highlighted that social and economic inequalities and environmental problems are systemic and inextricably linked problems (Godfrey and Torres 2016). In other words, intersectionality can aid us in emphasizing how intersecting “isms” (such as capitalism, colonialism, racism, [hetero] sexism, rationalism, and speciesism) both contribute to and are exacerbated by environmental problems such as climate change (Patterson 2016). Intersectional thinking has been used in the broader feminist environmental literature as a useful tool to analyze “capitalism, rationalist science, colonialism, racism, (hetero) sexism and speciesism” (MacGregor 2017, pp. 1–​2). However, empirical research on climate change has hitherto largely focused on the Global South and developing states; on the violence of climate events, storms, hurricanes, and fires; and on gendered vulnerability to such events (Rydstrom and Kinnvall 2019). Less attention has been paid to what intersectional approaches could contribute to the analysis of climate policy within climate institutions, especially in the Global North. Importantly, intersectionality can help us bring in an analysis of how power relations between “humans” and “nature” are connected and entangled. For, as Castán Broto and Westman (2019) argue, we need to be concerned not only with what matters to people but also what matters to nature. Discriminative conditions are often constructed through the placing of categories in hierarchical structures as well as through the construction of dichotomies where one opposite is defined as the norm and the other as deviant. Several feminist scholars, such as Plumwood (1993), have highlighted that the domination of nature is closely tied to the domination of humans by humans, building on Merchant who argued that dualism is “a key factor in Western civilization’s advance at the expense of nature” (Merchant 1980, p. 143). These long-​standing so-​called dualisms are framed as inherent to Western thought, which constructs the world as a series of opposites—​human–​nature, male–​female, or reason–​emotion—​and is a cultural tradition with roots in Greek and Roman society, Christianity, and the Enlightenment. They enable control of the non-​human and all groups and elements associated with the natural environment such as female bodies, indigenous lands, or racialized groups or individuals. Furthermore, according to this dominant worldview, man represents reason, spirituality, immortality, and agency, whereas woman and nature represent emotion, embodiment, mortality, primitivism, and inferiority. This is problematic since, in modern society, this dualism translates into a perceived superiority of science, rationality, and modernity, which allows for instrumental views on nature

230    Annica KronseLl et al. and continued exploitation. Through such dualistic construction, domination of humans over nature is established and maintained, leading not only to a distorted understanding of human–​nature relations (cf. Gaard 2015), but also to unjust relations. “Unjust” in terms of which groups are rendered more vulnerable, more affected, and who has benefited from previous unsustainable resource use by privileging and supporting particular actors and knowledges (see also Kaijser and Kronsell 2016). By addressing power in this way, as relational and dynamic, intersectionality sheds light on how patterns of privilege and marginalization are structured, articulated, and negotiated. It also brings in nature and the material as a “category” or “sphere of analysis” and thus moves away from the imagined divide between the material and social worlds. This aspect of an intersectional approach is particularly interesting to us as it is well-​shaped to address environmental concerns since it does not separate equality from its socioeconomic and bio-​ geophysical context. In the context of climate institutions, it means that we ask questions about how this relationship is addressed and conceptualized.

Analysis of Swedish Climate Institutions Our research began with a focus on the formal and material aspects of climate institutions. We paid particular attention to institutional “stickiness” or path dependence by asking critical questions in the text analysis and of the policy-​makers we interviewed. The questions concerned how issues are organized within the policy agenda. We searched for any explicit and visible assumptions about social categories and their relations in the institution, its organization, and its documents. These are considered indicative of the systems of meaning-​ making used by policy-​makers. Accordingly, we have analyzed which social categories are conceptualized and recognized in policy-​making on climate change and which categories are absent in the policy-​making process within the aforementioned institutions and in the key policy documents that they produce. Through this research and in dialogue with policy-​ makers, we outline what would be expected from a climate policy process that is inclusive of intersectional concerns and, hence, more effective, democratic, legitimate, and just. As a first step, we performed a discourse analysis of key strategy documents from three of the four government agencies involved in Swedish climate policy-​making: the EPA, STA, and the SEA. Discourse analysis, a method that considers language and text as expressive of power relations (Bacchi 1999), is particularly apt at revealing power relations in text in terms of what is written and what is not, thus pointing to powerful norms. Discourse analysis allows us to pose critical intersectional questions of the material: Through what practices is the institution governed? What symbols and norms are important? How are norms for sustainable lifestyles reflected in practices? Furthermore, power relations in a specific place and situation can generate a certain type of knowledge (Agarwal 2000). It is therefore important to question universal claims and instead ask what types of knowledge and what types of political subject are recognized (Kaijser and Kronsell 2014). The discourse analysis provided background information that was employed in devising questions for the second step: an interview study with people employed at the various ministries (N =​31). Due to the ongoing COVID-​19 pandemic, we chose telephone/​online interviews as the collection method. In collecting these data, we perceive policy-​makers

An Intersectional Exploration of Climate Institutions    231 not as passive informants but as interlocutors whose awareness about climate-​relevant social differences can be heightened via interviews. The questions posed served to identify and analyze assumptions about social categories, knowledge, lifestyle ideals, and the legitimacy of subjects that are embedded in institutions and manifested in their practices. They can help us better understand which dominant norms of the climate institutions may possibly provide the path dependence and “stickiness” that works against transformation. In particular, the interviews helped us understand through which practices climate policy-​ makers relate to the institutions and how they view and work with intersectional issues—​or why they did not. It should be noted that our ambition here was not to include as many voices as possible, but to engage those actors who had an interest in discussing intersectional power relations in climate policy-​making. The ambition was to find the most engaged policy-​makers who would most likely play the role of so-​called green inside activists; institutionally embedded individuals personally committed to green movement values who seek to further these values within an institution to induce policy and institutional change (cf. Hysing and Olsson 2017). When we explored the conceptualization and recognition of social categories within key policy documents from the EPA, STA, SEA, and VIN, we found that institutional understandings of social difference were simplistic, with many social categories and their intersections unrecognized. This has manifold implications for environmental justice within Swedish society (Singleton et al. 2021). For example, STA and SEA documents frame “nature” as largely a backdrop to the infrastructure they maintain. In contrast, EPA frames nature as Sweden’s “green infrastructure.” What these framings share is a largely inert, objectified view of nature as something needing management, in contrast with, for example, alternative ideas of various non-​human actors in diverse webs of relationships. Interviews largely confirmed the picture of the discourse analysis but added nuance. Several examples serve to illustrate the simplistic framings of social justice and climate justice. For example, the STA largely interprets diversity in terms of population density, using a system of three categories: “large urban” (storstad), “middle-​sized” (medelbebyggda), and “sparsely populated” (glesbygd). A standing assumption within this framing of social difference is that greater potential exists for positive climate action in urban areas rather than rural, where it is assumed people depend on cars. One effect of this is that Sweden’s rural areas are erroneously depicted as a homogenous mass, which may affect the types of climate actions proposed, tending to argue for greater population densities and concomitant development of public transport infrastructure. Similarly, fairly generic assumptions are made that women, disabled people, and children will broadly benefit from this action (Singleton et al. 2021). The differences between members of those groups are occluded. There is also little space for discussion of the roles certain lifestyle practices play within certain people’s identities. One respondent pointed out there was a tendency to operate with standardized pictures of what, for example, a “city family” is like and a lack of reflection over the actual diversity of the population. It also made people blind to the complexities obscured by simple maxims such as “reduce car use.” One respondent gave this clear example: I sometimes test people about an [transport system] accessibility problem in Sweden. It is that immigrant women seldom have either a driving license or access to a car. . . and they live in places with poor public transport. This means that their access to public services and culture and other things are often quite restricted. So one could consider if one should have

232    Annica KronseLl et al. specific driving schools for immigrant women, so they could get [a license]. But the reaction is. . . drive a car? We can’t let people do that [because of climate change]. (iSTA06)

This quote highlights the possibility that climate change actions (i.e., policies around transport) may have unforeseen intersectional consequences within diverse groups of Swedish society, potentially leaving some groups (e.g., migrant women) worse off vis-​à-​ vis others (elite, male car users who presumably already have high mobility). This was despite a general awareness among respondents that effective climate action should not disproportionately affect particular groups and that to do so risked provoking resistance. Additionally, as the STA is the body responsible for accessibility to the transport system, there was seemingly little possibility to question notions of mobility and accessibility as simple common goods. Furthermore, while there were minor differences across the respondent sample, a shared broad understanding of “social justice” emerged through the interviews. In general, the picture painted included a need for collective action, as well as an awareness that climate change activities are uneven in their effects. However, what seems particularly noteworthy is a marked tendency to move to the international scale when talking about justice, with respondents framing justice as a global issue. Here, Sweden was framed as a contributor on a global scale to finding solutions to the climate crisis, acting as an inspiration. As one respondent from the EPA put it, The whole idea behind Sweden’s climate work is not that we will just do our little share of the work that is needed, rather, in order to deal with the climate crisis, we [Sweden] must inspire and spread our work so that the effects ripple out, for otherwise we will not solve the climate question. So, we must do things outside of Sweden as well. (iEPA01)

Putting aside merits and critiques of this approach, it further highlights the difficulties many agencies had in focusing on social justice issues within Sweden. While several respondents were able to point to projects abroad that contributed to, for example, women’s improved social standing, they seldom voiced the view that such work is necessary in Sweden. This could be interpreted as an institutional norm, excluding gender in the Swedish context. The iSTA06 quote in the previous paragraph highlights the existence of distinct intersectional impacts of climate change policy. However, despite this, a framing of Sweden as a place where social justice has already been “done” successfully was extant, which is in line with Sweden´s self-​image in the international system as an eco-​entrepreneur, advocate of social justice, and conflict preventer (Björkdahl 2008; Magnusdottir and Thorhallsson 2011). This likely contributes to the limited dimensions of social difference that respondents articulated, which could lead to a certain path dependency in the policy-​making process that excludes relevant social categories (as discussed earlier). Many respondents were aware of their limited ability to better integrate social justice dimensions into their work, asserting that this needed to be improved. Indeed, in institutional language many respondents across the different agencies reflected that their current activities were very much a product of institutional path-​dependency and norms (Singleton and Magnusdottir 2021). For example, respondents at VIN often struggled to separate climate change activities from other priorities within their broad remit to make Sweden and innovation-​friendly place. Thus, speaking specifically about the intersectional impacts of climate change work was challenging. The time scales that different agencies worked on

An Intersectional Exploration of Climate Institutions    233 were also factors that encouraged path dependency around social justice and each agency’s remit. For example, the STA builds infrastructure such as motorways intended to operate for long periods of time, and it maintains infrastructure already in place. This necessarily presents challenges for assessing the social impacts of any work: What time scale is relevant, and when is work actually complete? One respondent from the EPA made a similar point, noting that they tended to integrate social dimensions into their work post hoc, when assessing project impacts. As such, social justice was regarded as important but falling outside of institutional understandings of the EPA’s remit generally. When questioned, respondents would describe how meaning-​making regarding climate change and social justice were the products of historical trajectories of the institutions that embedded them (Singleton and Magnusdottir 2021). In such circumstances, it becomes hard for policy-​ makers to gauge the blind spots of any given institutional lens. It was common among respondents to assert that they would like to focus more on the social effects of agency work but that this was outside of their purview. Furthermore, across the sample, respondents would invoke political authority if asked about why they approached climate change and social justice issues in a particular way. More specifically, there was a narrative that agencies’ authority and activities are set by the current government. Thus, each agency was influenced by its relationship to particular government departments and the exact tasks they had been set. Indeed, across the respondent sample, interviewees often asserted that their legitimacy as civil servants links to their respect of the role demarcated by a democratically elected government (Hysing and Olsson 2017; Singleton and Magnusdottir 2021). As such, if guidance was unclear or unforthcoming on climate or social justice issues, respondents often felt it was a struggle to incorporate these issues into their work. In such circumstances, concepts were not necessarily “mainstreamed” and activities appeared more dependent on individuals’ taking the initiative (cf. Hysing and Olsson 2017). Indeed, the extent that inside activism was considered desirable was unclear, as it was at times seen as clashing with agencies’ role as a neutral provider of knowledge and as expediting Swedish government decisions (Olsen, 2006; Singleton and Magnusdottir 2021; Svara 2001). A few respondents highlighted a further issue relating to this: the concept of “social justice” was itself sometimes framed as a political issue and thus external to the role of agencies within the Swedish system. A desire to avoid entering a political arena was thus cited as a factor mitigating against focusing on the justice aspects of climate change action.

Conclusion and Ways Forward From the collated research material, we conclude that the climate institutions in question need tools that will allow them to appreciate the complex manner that social difference is constructed and perpetuated, in part by the agencies’ own actions. Likewise, they need to appreciate that climate actions have complex effects which will materially impact different groups in differential fashion, as well as affect the likelihood of a climate action’s success (Singleton et al. 2021). Furthermore, information and tools (such as an intersectional approach) need to be transmitted in ways that are understandable within the path-​dependent world of Swedish government agencies. This is a key finding for efforts to engender broader

234    Annica KronseLl et al. understandings of social and environmental justice into the four agencies. There is a need to demonstrate that tools for integrating more nuanced perspectives fall within agencies’ remits. Likewise, advocates for intersectional approaches should be aware of the perceived importance of neutrality, or the appearance of neutrality, to policy-​makers’ roles and professional identities. Elsewhere, we propose this may be managed by highlighting how proposed changes to agencies’ approaches to social justice are very much in line with both government remit and majority views of the Swedish population (Singleton and Magnusdottir 2021). This may allow for greater integration of useful knowledge rather than foment knowledge resistance (cf. Klintman 2019). One such approach is to identify examples of the intersectional impact of each agency’s work to illustrate the relevance of an intersectional institutional analysis and framework. Indeed, across the broad swath of respondents, there was widespread interest in intersectionality, and our research provoked invitations to subsequently present our work. We intend to avail ourselves of this opportunity to collect more data and exchange knowledge about intersectionality with potential inside activists. We would thus hope to contribute to more nuanced understandings of the intersectional causes and impacts of climate change activities. Through this work, we hope to convince policy-​makers of the need for a more holistic understanding of climate change and its interconnectedness with issues of justice and equality. An intersectional approach can aid us in moving away from a dualistic understanding of nature and society, to an understanding where “nature,” climate, and the biophysical environment is inseparable from the “social,” “cultural,” or “human.” Such an understanding can shed light on how power relations are not detached from environmental and climate issues but instead are intrinsic to these issues. Although our work in this respect is sector-​ specific, the knowledge is likely relevant for institutions in other countries. For example, as mentioned in the Introduction, transport and energy ministries and agencies across Europe are highly masculinized. As such, learning from the STA can provide insights that are valuable for investigating other institutions. A more nuanced and holistic understanding of the intersectional impacts of climate change policy and activities can teach us important lessons about how the work of climate institutions can become more socially and environmentally just, not solely in the context of Sweden and the state agency level, but also across other country contexts and scales of governance. By now, at the end of this chapter, we hope to have convinced the reader of the importance of an intersectional lens for much comparative environmental politics, a lens that is still largely lacking but one that we urge others to adopt. Thus, it is our hope that we may have provided inspiration for replications and a spread of similar studies elsewhere. Inevitably, several insights from such studies are and will be context-​specific because power relations are situated in a certain place and time. However, it is our hope that the method of how to pursue contextually sensitive and situated analyses and understandings of the complex intersections of power relations can be used across contexts (in contrast to a universally applicable solutions-​oriented checklist that can be applied everywhere). The aim is then to develop an intersectional practice, method, and/​or tool so that policy-​makers within climate institutions across the globe can pursue the more progressive and transformative climate change and justice efforts that the world so direly needs.

An Intersectional Exploration of Climate Institutions    235

Acknowledgments This chapter was written as part of the Swedish Research Council Formas’ project (FR-​2018/​ 0010 2018-​12-​01 -​2022-​11-​30) Intersectionality and Climate Policy Making: Ways Forward to a Socially Inclusive and Sustainable Welfare State, hosted by the School of Global Studies, with Annica Kronsell as project leader.

Notes 1. https://​www.gu.se/​en/​resea​rch/​inters​ecti​onal​ity-​and-​clim​ate-​pol​icy-​mak​ing-​ways-​forw​ ard-​to-​a-​socia​lly-​inclus​ive-​and-​sust​aina​ble-​welf​are-​state. 2. In this chapter, “policy-​maker” denotes civil servants or public officials within the state agencies and not elected politicians.

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Chapter 13

Ge nder and C ompa rat i v e Environmenta l P ol i t i c s Examining Population Debates Through Gender Lenses Nicole Detraz In March 2010, I attended a workshop of environmental politics scholars. During the course of our small group discussions on the future of environmental politics someone said, “can we put population growth back on the table now?” After a few seconds of silence, another participant said “no, because of everything else that goes with it.” I have thought about that exchange frequently over the intervening years. These were two scholars from the same field who expressed significantly different views about what it meant to “put population growth on the table.” For some, talking about population might mean opening the door to understanding how human behavior influences serious, large-​scale environmental problems. For others, it might mean opening the door to blaming certain groups of people, often women from the Global South, for these same environmental problems. Environmental activism and policy-​making have long been shaped by questions of population growth. Malthusian predictions of food shortages, environmental decline, and human misery have influenced environmental discussions for centuries. More recently, attention to numerous topics related to population has increased, including the links between population growth and/​or movement and climate change and also concerns about ageing and shrinking populations across the international system. While population trends are driven by changes in three factors—​fertility, migration, and mortality—​many population debates within both academics and policy-​making have contained an oversized focus on fertility. This chapter uses gender lenses to evaluate recent population debates and the implications of dominant discourses within those debates. “Discourses” refer to the way we make sense of the world. They are powerful forces within both academic and policy debates. I use Maarten Hajer’s (1995, p. 45) definition of discourses as “specific ensembles of ideas, concepts and categorization that are produced, reproduced and transformed in a particular set of practices and through which meaning is given to physical and social realities.” This definition suggests that discourses are constantly evolving entities shaped by society over

Gender and Comparative Environmental Politics    241 time. Simultaneously, discourses are entities that actors can draw on strategically in order to gain attention for a particular issue or frame an issue in a specific way. Examining population discourses enables us as scholars of environmental politics to understand debates about population as fluid and socially conditioned. Many scholars have weighed in on not only population dynamics in the international system, but also on population discourses, or the ways we understand and talk about population as an issue that connects with the environment (Bhatia et al. 2020; Coole 2013; Hartmann 1995, 2010a, 2010b; Ojeda et al. 2020; Sasser 2018). This chapter builds on this scholarship as well as feminist environmental research spanning multiple disciplines to ask about the gendered implications of environment and population discourses. It focuses largely on population discourses in the US context that have also tended to have implications far outside of US borders. Women appear in various guises across environment and population frames—​as childbearers, as climate refugees, as poor immigrants, and as marginalized members of society in need of empowerment—​but what are the implications of these portrayals? Paying particular attention to the politics of climate change, this chapter argues that environment and population discourses in multiple spaces continue to reflect rigid gender norms and assumptions about who in society are environmental saviors and who are environmental problems (see also chapters in the volume by Kashwan, Fuentes-​George, and Kronsell, et al.). It argues that failure to critically evaluate population discourses contributes to injustice among peoples and among states. While the most extreme forms of population discourses linking women’s fertility to food insecurity and environmental decline have shifted away from their most extreme versions, other developments are also worrying from the perspective of gender justice.

Population Debates Over Time There are numerous actors who use environment and population frames, including international organizations, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), states, and academics in various disciplines. Within the Global North, concern about population growth is typically traced back to the writing of English clergyman and economist Thomas Malthus in the late 1700s.1 Malthus (1798) feared that decline and disaster would be brought on by an overwhelming throng of people—​the poor in particular. He was doubtful that technology or human ingenuity could avoid the very worst consequences of population growth—​including famine, poverty, and pestilence. He advocated sexual abstinence and late marriages as individual-​level changes necessary to reduce population growth. He also suggested revisions to public welfare as a way to discourage large families (Dalby 2009; Hartmann 1995; Robertson 2012). These Malthusian fears about population impacts declined during the course of the 19th century as birth rates in Europe dropped. Concerns about overpopulation reappeared over time in the works of several prominent scholars like Garrett Hardin, Paul and Anne Ehrlich, and the Club of Rome (Bandarage 1997). These scholars represented a resurgence in scholarly and public use of alarmist overpopulation narratives in the 1960s and 1970s, often drawing from biological sciences “that emphasized carrying capacity, ecological interconnection, overconsumption, degradation, and hard limits to growth” (Robertson 2012,

242   Nicole Detraz Average Annual Rate of Change of the Total Population (percent) 3.00 2.50 2.00 1.50 1.00 0.50 0.00

1950 – 1955 – 1960 – 1965 – 1970 – 1975 – 1980 – 1985 – 1990 – 1995 – 2000 – 2005 – 2010 – 2015 – 1955 1960 1965 1970 1975 1980 1985 1990 1995 2000 2005 2010 2015 2020 World Middle-income countries Upper-middle-income countries

High-income countries Lower-middle-income countries Low-income countries

Figure 13.1  Average annual rate of change of the total population (percent). Source: United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (2018).

p. 2). These neo-​Malthusians shifted focus from population growth rates among the poor in the Global North to population growth rates in the Global South. They continued to argue that the overarching outcome of “unchecked” population growth would be massive levels of food scarcity. Once again, these dire predictions did not come to pass as predicted. For instance, policies and agricultural reforms associated with the Green Revolution resulted in increased food production in many states in the Global South between the 1960s and 1980s (Clapp 2012). While the Green Revolution has been strongly critiqued on both social and environmental grounds, it illustrates that simplistic narratives about population growth leading to food insecurity are inaccurate (Hartmann 1995; Detraz 2017). Overall population growth has been slowing over the past several years. In 2019, the United Nations (2019, p. 1) noted that the world’s population was growing at its slowest pace since 1950. While still growing in many states in the Global South, particularly within low-​income countries2 (as seen in Figure 13.1), reduced levels of fertility in several states in the Global North have resulted in a slower rate of growth overall.3 These trends mean that population growth discourses continue to be focused on populations from or within the Global South (Figure 13.2). There have always been those who have vocally criticized alarmist overpopulation frames. Some critiques have focused on the links between technological promise and human population (Boserup 1992; Simon 1990). These perspectives tend to argue that population growth is a source of human innovation and ingenuity. Other critics of neo-​Malthusian overpopulation narratives point out that they are based on gendered, classed, and raced assumptions about “human behavior.” According to Betsy Hartmann (1995, p. 13), alarmist messages

Gender and Comparative Environmental Politics    243

Annual Total Population at Mid-Year (thousands) 9 000 000 8 000 000 7 000 000 6 000 000 5 000 000 4 000 000 3 000 000 2 000 000 1 000 000 0 1950 1955 1960 1965 1970 1975 1980 1985 1990 1995 2000 2005 2010 2015 2020 Africa World Asia Latin America and the Caribbean

Europe Northern America

Oceania

Figure 13.2  Annual total population at mid-​year (thousands). Source: United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (2018).

have repeatedly found receptive audiences in the Global North because they draw on “deep undercurrents of parochialism, racism, elitism, and sexism, complementing the Social Darwinist ‘survival of the fittest view.’ ” Multiple scholars have used the opening scene of The Population Bomb as evidence of this tendency. In it, Ehrlich (1968), along with his wife Anne who was an uncredited author for the book, describe a cab ride their family took around Delhi in 1966. They describe scenes of people stacked upon people—​eating, visiting, washing, screaming, begging, clinging to buses. The book uses this anecdote as an example to draw the reader into a conversation about population, but it reflects a particular way of depicting people of the Global South that is fairly typical within population debates. According to Charles Mann (2018), The Ehrlichs took the cab ride in 1966. How many people lived in Delhi then? A bit more than 2.8 million, according to the United Nations. By comparison, the 1966 population of Paris was about 8 million. No matter how carefully one searches through archives, it is not easy to find expressions of alarm about how the Champs-​Élysées was “alive with people.” Instead, Paris in 1966 was an emblem of elegance and sophistication.

In the years since the book’s publication, Ehrlich has complained that critics unfairly focus in on that early passage, yet he cannot refute that he chose it as his hook, and it found purchase. It is consistent with much of the dominant environment and population discourses from the 1960s and 1970s which tended to identify communities in the Global South where population growth was high as “the other” with unsustainable and irrational ways that differed from Global North. No one would dispute that cities like Delhi experienced rapid growth in the 1960s and 1970s. In fact, the population of Delhi had reached 4.4 million by 1975, which represented a dramatic gain over the course of just one decade. Much of this

244   Nicole Detraz increase was due to urbanization—​people moving to the city to work in factories and other industrial employment, a trend supported by several government initiatives (Mann 2018). What this chapter addresses is the way we describe these trends: the lenses we use to understand and act on them and the implications they have for how we understand and act toward the communities they are applied to. There is a great deal of evidence to suggest that Northern population discourses were influential in shaping the terms of global population debates. Northern fears about population growth were exported to colonies during the colonial period and continued to influence policy-​making of many elites who became leaders post-​independence (Hartmann 1995). Many newly independent states also supported investments in nutrition and health initiatives for women and children. These kinds of policies contributed to rapid population growth rates and, simultaneously, varied forms of poverty and entrenched gender norms (Hartmann 1995; Harper 2016). Additionally, as population growth became squarely on the agenda in the Global North in the late 1960s and early 1970s, multiple international organizations funded and promoted programs to reduce fertility among the poor across the international system. These included the World Bank, the United Nations Population Fund, the Population Council, and the International Planned Parenthood Federation (Connelly 2003).4 While the most alarming predictions of Malthusians have not come to pass, population discourses have remained in the international consciousness, although in slightly different forms over time. Larry Lohmann (2005, p. 82) describes two sides of Malthusianism—​a dark, monster version that speaks of “clouds of Barbarians” or a “human tide” overwhelming us, and a more palatable daytime Malthusianism. This is the Malthusianism that more visibly underpins a scaffolding of two centuries of productive thinking about private property, “free markets,” government policy, development, and biology. From what it sees as a natural, quasi-​logarithmic relationship between available food and the labor used to grow it, this Malthusianism derives or predicts a political regime featuring economic scarcity, enclosure, market-​allocated food and labor, inequality, sharp divisions between owners and nonowners of land and sexuality and a zero-​sum game between humans and nature, with the stakes being nature.

This daytime version avoids the starkest expressions of racism, sexism, and classism that marked (and still mark) its Jekyllish other half. It relies on “common knowledge” of the ways “we” know things must work (Hildyard 1999). Through the years this daytime Malthusianism has made its way into discussions about environmental and climate security as well as immigration and environmental change. It is to these two specific discourses that we next turn.

Population and Environmental Security Discourse The population and environmental security discourse has been widely used by scholars, policy-​makers, and the media for several decades (Detraz 2014). The key linkages are between population pressures, environmental change, and insecurity of the state or human communities. A central storyline within the discourse connects population growth as well as population movement to environmental scarcity and this scarcity to conflict and state

Gender and Comparative Environmental Politics    245 instability.5 The storyline identifies a range of connections between population and insecurity, including population growth overwhelming state capacity for the provision of basic services, to conflicts over access to scarce resources, to lack of economic opportunities—​ particularly for large cohorts of young people—​leading to social unrest (Choucri 1974; Homer-​Dixon 1999). This focus on scarcity and resource distribution is a consistent storyline in this frame. In the words of Norman Myers (1996, p. 152), “environmental problems are compounded by the factors of population growth, if not caused by it. This factor serves both to exacerbate environmental decline and to leave still larger numbers of people suffering environmental impoverishment. Thus, there is great scope in population growth for conflict of multiple types—​scope that will increase as growing numbers of people try to sustain themselves off declining environments.” Within these scholarly works the population and environmental security discourse treats population “pressure” as a variable that interacts with others to influence both causes and experiences of environmental damage. They tend to approach the issue of population in a clinical way, avoiding the alarmist tone of earlier neo-​Malthusian work while still pointing to population growth as a potential challenge to environmental sustainability or state/​ human security. The population and environmental security discourse has also appeared in numerous policy documents and reports by states and international organizations from around the world (Dalby 2009; Floyd 2010). Population and environmental security storylines were enthusiastically embraced in the 1990s by many in the US foreign policy establishment. Work like that of Homer-​Dixon6 and others helped provide the underpinning for a post-​Cold War shift for defense and intelligence agencies (Hartmann 2010a). The discourse helped transition environmental concerns from low politics to high politics and, with it, transition to the purview of militarized institutions. Additionally, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC 2014) has indicated a link between climate change, population displacement, and potential conflict by saying “[p]‌opulations that lack the resources for planned migration experience higher exposure to extreme weather events, particularly in developing countries with low income. Climate change can indirectly increase risks of violent conflicts by amplifying well-​documented drivers of these conflicts such as poverty and economic shocks.” This statement illustrates the discourse’s focus on the connections between population and environmental security. It also specifically contains an emphasis on population movement and how that can heighten insecurity.

Population and Immigration Discourse The IPCC statement illustrates some of the connections between the population and environmental security discourse and a separate but related population and immigration discourse. The population and immigration discourse is rooted in concern about the negative side effects of population movement, or migration. This discourse focuses on both environmental and social/​political impacts of migration and the links across them. It specifically emphasizes population movement either internally or across borders, but also often includes the argument that migration will increase when population growth increases due to the resource demands discussed earlier. A good deal of scholarly work focuses on the relationships between environmental change, population growth and movement, and state instability or conflict (Baechler 1999; Myers 2001; Percival and Homer-​Dixon 2001; Swain

246   Nicole Detraz 1996; Westing 1992; 1994). Some of the same mechanisms are at play within this discourse—​ perceived scarcity and insecurity in particular—​but there is a specific focus on migration either caused or exacerbated by environmental change. People fleeing environmental marginalization or natural disasters are typically regarded as security threats within this frame. Simon Dalby (2009, p. 144) explains when these migrants are linked to refugee and immigration concerns, and especially to illegal immigration and the potential political problems caused by these people, as has frequently been done in the post-​9/​11 world, then once again the criminal frame and the security response are deemed necessary. The dangers of this come precisely in circumstances where sudden mass migrations are triggered by disasters.

Using this discourse, migrants are cast as burdens on scarce resources and potential problems for the state to address. An additional storyline in the population and immigration discourse focuses on the specific environmental consequences of immigration. Actors, including scholars, policy-​makers, and NGOs, have put forward several reasons for why migration might contribute to long-​ term environmental harm, including the idea that immigrant populations from the Global South tend to have higher fertility rates than existing populations in the Global North and that these populations will likely increase their environmental footprint if they adopt prevalent lifestyles of the Global North (Price and Feldmeyer 2012).7 We can see multiple examples of this storyline over years of US policy-​making. For instance, the 1996 President’s Council on Sustainable Development Population and Consumption Task Force Report (1996, p. 8), concluded that while it “is a sensitive issue,” “reducing immigration levels is a necessary part of population stability and the drive toward sustainability.” The report contained a number of specific population policy recommendations,8 including a goal to “[i]‌ncrease and improve public outreach, educational efforts, and access to related contraceptive methods and reproductive health,” particularly among adolescents, along with a call to “[d]evelop immigration and foreign policies that reduce illegal immigration, while researching the links between demographic change and sustainable development.” We can see evidence of the population and immigration discourse in global environmental negotiations as well. For instance, Harlan Watson, the chief US negotiator at the 2007 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) convention argued that high immigration to the United States makes it harder to slow its rising greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. He argued that “It’s simple arithmetic. . . . If you look at mid-​ century, Europe will be at 1990 levels of population while ours will be nearing 60 percent above 1990 levels. So population does matter” (Doyle 2007). In both of these examples, immigration is framed as an environmental negative that the United States has to address. Several academic studies have examined the influence of immigration on environmental negatives like air pollution and GHG emissions in the United States and found very little to support the argument that immigration leads to greater levels of environmental harm than other factors (Price and Feldmeyer 2012; Squalli 2009). There are several reasons put forth for why immigration fails to result in greater environmental change, including that immigrants tend to have lower levels of consumption than those born in the United States (Dietz and Rosa 1997). Additionally, recent immigrants tend to express higher concern for the environment and are more likely to engage in environmentally friendly behaviors

Gender and Comparative Environmental Politics    247 such as reduced meat consumption and water conservation than are US-​born individuals (Hunter 2000; Pfeffer and Stycos 2002). Despite this empirical evidence to the contrary, the immigration and environmental harm storyline continues to be repeated as justification for immigration reform or immigration limits in the United States and beyond. The storyline has been used quite visibly by US-​based organizations like Carrying Capacity Network, NumbersUSA, and Population-​ Environment Balance who present links between immigration, often specifically framed as “illegal” immigration, and environmental issues like trash/​pollution, increased risk of fires, illegal roads, and declining wildlife populations in border regions. They also express fears about issues like increased pollution, congestion, traffic, and sprawl in cities, as well as increased GHG emissions due to immigration. Several of these organizations9 have been linked to noted anti-​immigration activist and conservationist John Tanton. Tanton was an ophthalmologist who was heavily involved in US environmental advocacy in the late 1950s and 1960s. In the 1970s, he chaired the Sierra Club’s National Population Committee as well as founded and served on the board of Zero Population Growth (Hultgren 2015). Over the years, Tanton became associated with anti-​immigration policies considered too extreme for most mainstream environmental organizations, yet he got his start with a great concern about the environmental negatives of “overpopulation.” This is consistent with what scholar Betsy Hartmann has called “the greening of hate”: using environmental concerns to justify harsh policies aimed at marginalized communities (Aufrecht 2012). Both the population and environmental security discourse as well as the population and immigration discourse have received significant criticism from scholars who argue that, like other neo-​Malthusian narratives, they are premised on problematic assumptions that often simplify the relationship between population growth, population movement, and environment change (Barnett 2001; Dalby 2009; Lohmann 2005; Hartmann 2010a; Hartmann and Hendrixson 2005). Taken together, the discourses reflect concerns beyond the simple link between population growth and scarcity to include fears about not only the sustainability of ecosystems, but also the composition of states. “This questionable premise escapes notice when embedded in stories of undeserving Others moving into Our space; or of the commons being overexploited by free riders; or of population bombs going off; or of Our overloaded lifeboat in the middle of a lake in a storm being faced with the prospect of Others from surrounding shipwrecks trying to clamber aboard” (Lohmann 2005, pp. 92–​ 93). In other words, the frames combine fears of insecurity, scarcity, or environmental damage with the fear of the behavior of “the other.” For Malthus, “the other” was the throngs of “the poor” who were destined to make trouble for themselves and the whole community. For the population and environmental security discourse, “the other” is the community that will overwhelm an already weak state or engage in violence over access to scarce resources. One particularly troubling aspect of these discourses, along with the other dominant threads of population debates, rarely, if ever, considers the myriad ways that population growth and movement are deeply gendered as well as raced and classed (Detraz 2014). The migration component of the population and immigration discourse in particular renders it useful for highlighting how “otherness” is infused in these debates. It is concern for the behavior of “them” that has allowed the frame to guide thinking about women’s fertility and whether it constitutes a problem for the state. When gender does appear in these discourses, it is through the implicit depiction of women as childbearers. Nonwhite women, and particularly black women, have been cast “in the dramatic role of the helplessly fertile Others”

248   Nicole Detraz (Lohmann 2005, p. 93). The desire to restrict immigration in the name of environmental protection echoes previous tendencies to target the fertility of black women in places like the United States, United Kingdom, and South Africa for the goals of poverty reduction or resource control. Marginalized women were most frequently targeted for population control measures like sterilization—​first poor white women when Malthusian narratives focused mostly on class, then women of color as their orientation shifted over time (Hartmann 1995). While China’s “one child” policy is likely the most widely known throughout the world, numerous states have implemented severe population reduction measures over time, including the sterilization of individuals who were classified as “unfit” to reproduce. For example, it is estimated that thousands of women a year underwent forced sterilization in the United States between the late 1960s and early 1970s. A large number of these women were black, Native American, and Hispanic (Nelson 2003). Policies in states around the world which attempt to address “overpopulation” have frequently targeted poor women or women who are members of minority or marginalized groups. Very few examples of population control measures, including coercive ones, have targeted men (Bandarage 1997; Hartmann 1995). These policy battles have largely played out on marginalized women’s bodies. Both environmental organizations and anti-​immigration organizations have used population and environmental security as well as population and immigration discourses to express dismay at what they see as the environmental problems wrought by immigration.10 Some of these discourses rely on problematic frames to paint women of color as a root of environmental ills (Hartmann 2010a; Hultgren 2015). John Hultgren (2015: 128) explains that “immigration ‘restrictionists’ place incredible emphasis on women’s fertility . . . [w]‌hether done out of genuine environmental concerns or anxieties related to a declining Anglo-​European majority.” In some cases, the health of the environment has been used as a screen for what at closer examination appears to be a deeper concern about the changing demographic composition of the state and society. “Subsumed into the analytic frame of population pressure, women through their fertility become the breeders of environmental destruction, poverty, and even violence, and controlling their fertility becomes a magic-​bullet solution” (Hartmann 2010a, p. 204). Men’s role in population growth is rarely discussed. When men do appear in demographic fears, they often play the role of potentially dangerous young men in the Global South who make up youth bulges (Sasser 2018). Both depictions of Southern women as childbearers and Southern men as prone to violence illustrate racially problematic assumptions about who makes trouble and where environmental trouble comes from.

Population, Environmental Health, and Empowerment Discourse The previous two section outlined discourses that highlight negative connections between environmental sustainability and population growth or population movement. This section explores an alternative population discourse which has emerged over the past several

Gender and Comparative Environmental Politics    249 decades and that specifically attempts to shed the Malthusian association of previous population debates and orient itself with discourses of sustainability coupled with women’s empowerment. This shift has been specifically associated with the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) in Cairo, where the norms and language of “population control” instead became the norms and language of “reproductive rights and health” (Eager 2004; Hartmann 2010a). The population, environmental health, and empowerment discourse paints population reduction, environmental sustainability, and women’s empowerment as a “win-​win-​win” situation. Various actors have called for things like social revolutions to enable women to make informed decisions about their reproductive choices, specifically within the frame of achieving environmental sustainability (Firor and Jacobsen 2002). For instance, Paul Ehrlich, of Population Bomb fame, argued in 2018 that we should “give women absolutely equal rights and opportunities. Make sure everybody has access to modern contraception and backup abortion. Teach everybody that you can have lots of fun with sex without having lots of children and change our entire society” (Ehrlich 2018). Additionally, climate change, contraception, and population all featured in speeches by both Bill Gates and former Vice President Al Gore at the 2014 World Economic Forum in Davos (Cox 2014). The population, environmental health, and empowerment frame has been widely used by the international development sector and typically contains an implicit assumption that actors in the Global North will be involved in providing poor women around the world with universal, voluntary access to contraceptives and education opportunities which will enable them to “make decisions about their childbearing in ways that affirm their human rights while benefiting the environment by decreasing human numbers. In this schema, fewer people will consume resources and use polluting technologies, relieving pressure on the earth and its atmosphere” (Sasser 2018, p. 2). It should be noted that the population, environmental health, and empowerment discourse is different from a specific, unique concern about women’s reproductive health. There are plenty of discourses oriented around a particular focus on ways to foster greater social and health outcomes for women around the world. These discourses center the wants and needs of women as the goal in and of itself rather than linking it to global concerns about environmental sustainability, overpopulation, or resource use. They respond to the very real need for maternal, infant, and childhood health services as well as poverty reduction and family planning services in countries in both the Global South and Global North (United Nations Population Fund 2019). In the context of the United States, scholars highlights frameworks like the Reproductive Justice (RJ) social movement—​a movement led by feminist women of color activists—​as an example of a frame that centers the health and agency of women (Luna 2009; Ross 2017; Sasser 2018). After 1994, RJ activists applied the human rights framework of the ICPD in Cairo to American reproductive debates and policy-​making. They organized a strategy based on a rejection of the extensive history of reproductive oppression in the United States which has been explicitly marked by race, gender, and poverty. [T]‌he founders of the RJ movement de-​center individual, private choice, abortion, and contraceptive access in their activism, replacing them with a comprehensive focus on the social, political, economic, and cultural contexts that shape women’s reproductive lives. Within this comprehensive focus, RJ activists frame the movement around the centrality of the right to

250   Nicole Detraz have children as well as the right not to have them, and to raise them with the necessary social resources to do so. (Sasser 2018, p. 126)

This is an example of a population discourse that is fundamentally oriented around the experiences and needs of those communities who are most impacted by population policies, along with other social and economic policies. On the other hand, the population, environmental health, and empowerment discourse is specifically oriented first around the problem of environmental change, and women’s empowerment is regarded as one way to address it. While it has proved to be extremely popular with states, international organizations (IGOs), and NGOs,11 it has been sharply critiqued as well. Critics argue that the discourse provides a positive spin on population fears while propping up dangerous narratives about women of the Global South as environmental problems. Betsy Hartmann (2010a, p. 194) argues that while the Cairo consensus “has helped spark many necessary reforms, it has also provided renewed legitimacy to neo-​ Malthusianism in US liberal policy circles, as one can now supposedly support women’s rights and population control at the same time.” Whereas previous population discourses often ignored gender in ways that were extremely detrimental to the human security of women across the international community, the population, environmental health, and empowerment discourse places “women” squarely at the forefront. However, the women are presented as “sexual stewards” in the words of Jade Sasser (2018, p. 5). In this depiction, “ ‘women’ are assumed to be fertile, reproductive beings, whose improved status will ideally lead to making responsible family choices—​choices that include the proper spacing, timing, and number of children that will slow global population growth.” Since this discourse is frequently connected to global environmental problems like climate change, these sexual stewards have their individual reproductive behaviors understood through the lens of global environmental calamity. Their fertility is seen as a legitimate concern for the international community because it is cast as a component of global environmental problems. It is bound up in the fears discussed in the previous sections—​fear of food insecurity, fear of resource conflict, fear of altered demographic composition—​thus making avoiding unwanted outcomes the central goal and women’s empowerment something secondary to it. The problem with this is that when women’s empowerment is no longer tied to the main goal of sustainability, then the international community no longer needs to prioritize it. Women’s empowerment, reproductive health, and gender justice in general are on much firmer footing when they are the heart of the discourse rather than a means to a different end. At the same time, the solutions to “overpopulation” offered tend to be oriented around individual women, including increased use of contraceptives and increased education. While these undoubtedly have resulted in better health and social outcomes for women in many circumstances (United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs 2019), this focus on the individual underemphasizes larger issues like poverty, gender inequality, and lack of access to comprehensive healthcare, all of which are thoroughly connected to women’s fertility and reproduction (Sasser 2018). Additionally, the focus on women’s fertility as a source of environmental trouble leaves men’s role in environmental change unexamined. It also allows policy-​makers, scholars, and others in the Global North to highlight behavior in the Global South as the driver of environmental change. It reinforces

Gender and Comparative Environmental Politics    251 popular assumptions about where threats to environmental sustainability lie by continuing to point to the poor of the Global South, letting the consumption of the Global North off the hook or at least out of the spotlight. More alarmingly, these same assumptions have resulted in decades worth of policies that undermine human security. These depictions of Southern women not only simplify environmental problems, but also can be used to justify dangerous policies like sterilization and other coercive elements of population control (Hartmann 2010b). The population, environmental health, and empowerment discourse, therefore, includes several problematic elements from the perspective of both gender justice and environmental sustainability.

But Climate Change! Concerns about climate change have served to add additional urgency to many of the environment and population discourses just discussed (Detraz 2017). Various actors now want to “put population back on the table” in order to address climate change. The IPPC (2014, p. 4), for example, has specifically mentioned population growth as contributing to climate change, arguing that “[a]‌nthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions have increased since the pre-​industrial era, driven largely by economic and population growth, and are now higher than ever. . . . Their effects, together with those of other anthropogenic drivers, have been detected throughout the climate system and are extremely likely to have been the dominant cause of the observed warming since the mid-​20th century.” Thus, population growth is identified as one of the central drivers of climate change alongside economic growth. We have seen numerous actors link climate change with population concerns. Some have identified environmental motivations for funding or implementing population reduction policies. For example, a working paper published by the UK’s Department for International Development in 2010 cited climate change as one of the key reasons for supporting population reduction programs through international aid. The authors claimed that reducing population numbers would cut GHG. Despite the fact that the document warned of “complex human rights and ethical issues” involved in population control, it still outlined reasons to support these kinds of policies with aid (Chamberlain 2012). Population discourses have also specifically been applied to climate change through concerns about climate-​induced scarcities and/​or climate refugees (Hartmann 2014). This climate-​migration-​conflict nexus has been the subject of a great deal of academic literature (Brzoska and Fröhlich 2016; Burrows and Kinney 2016; Nordås and Gleditsch 2007). Additionally, other actors have used population discourses to sketch possible negative futures if we fail to address climate change. For instance, the US-​based Center for Naval Analyses (2007, p. 6) outlines a climate future where: Economic and environmental conditions in already fragile areas will further erode as food production declines, diseases increase, clean water becomes increasingly scarce, and large populations move in search of resources. Weakened and failing governments, with an already thin margin for survival, foster the conditions for internal conflicts, extremism, and movement toward increased authoritarianism and radical ideologies.

252   Nicole Detraz This depiction of the world matches the dominant storyline in the environmental security discourse that discusses climate change as a “threat multiplier” that worsens existing sources of insecurity and instability. What is particularly interesting about the climate-​migration-​ conflict nexus, however, is that the discourse itself seems to be guiding international debate, rather than empirical evidence. In the words of Theisen, Gleditsch, and Buhaug (2013, p. 613) “the policy debate is running well ahead of its academic foundation—​and sometimes even contrary to the best evidence.” For instance, many media outlets attempted to link climate change to violent conflicts in places like Syria along with heightened levels of migration to Europe, all without robust empirical evidence of these connections (Abel et al. 2019; Daoudy 2020; Selby 2019). This illustrates the overwhelming power of many population discourses: they operate based on things that we think must be true, whether or not they have empirical backing. Anyone paying attention to climate change research for the past several decades is acutely aware that human behavioral change is necessary to effectively address it. Those who caution against simplistic environment and population frames are not arguing that effective climate action can be undertaken without fundamental change in the way we think about our future and our past. Rather, this chapter argues that bringing population into climate debates requires careful recognition of the ways that dramatic population discourses have been used to enact violence on the bodies of marginalized groups for centuries. Joni Seager uses the concept of “populationism” to indicate that population policies go far beyond population control12 or strict efforts by the state to limit women’s fertility. For her, populationism refers to “the dogma and the rhetoric of population alarmism and population control” (quoted in Kaufman and Nelson 2012, p. 430). The concept is also used by others to indicate that the implications of population discourses are larger than specific fertility reduction policies (Angus and Butler 2011; Bhatia et al. 2020; Kaufman and Nelson 2012). The central point is that when women’s fertility is linked to a global crisis like climate change, policy-​making is made out of fear. This is different from a goal of improving health outcomes for women. While some population control measures in the United States and beyond have resulted in improvements to the status of women, this has not always been the primary goal. There is some blurring that occurs across discourses, but policies driven by fear are often different from those driven by a desire to promote human rights. This is why the current chapter is explicitly focusing on discourse: how we understand a problem is going to shape what we assume to be appropriate or effective steps to address it. This suggests that it is not as simple as drawing a straight line between environmental concerns and population policies. We cannot divorce policy formation with the societal assumptions that undergird population discourse. Across time, women’s fertility has been bound up with the fate of the planet, individual states, and various other human communities. There are implications to these bindings. Each of the environment and population discourses discussed identifies population growth, composition, or movement as problematic for things we as humans tend to hold dear: the health of our environment, our security, and the future of our community. They identify an “other” as engaging in problematic behavior that needs addressing: fighting over scarce resources, undermining the stability or overwhelming the resources of the state, increasing the state’s ecological footprint, or failing to make “correct” choices about having children. If our goal is women’s reproductive health, then we should use discourses specifically oriented around that goal. The RJ movement in the United States offers us an example

Gender and Comparative Environmental Politics    253 of what this might look like in a context with a specific history of racialized, gendered, and classed population debates and policies. RJ goals should be decoupled from climate fears if we are to be guided toward policies that center the needs and agency of women. Additionally, environmental problems like climate change must not be attributed largely to population growth when economic factors like consumption are such a central part of the story. Compared to population, discussions of consumption are still often missing in global policy debates about major environmental challenges (Maniates and Meyer 2010). Various actors in the United States, such as scholars, NGOs, and policy-​makers, have a long history of warning the international community about the environmental dangers of overpopulation, yet there has been significantly less use of discourses focused on the environmental threat of consumption. If fact, part of the population and immigration discourse assumes that we cannot afford to let “others” consume like “us” because it is unsustainable. There is rarely, if ever, mention of addressing the unsustainable consumption practices of US-​born individuals within anti-​immigration organizations who frame their concerns through environmental lenses. For instance, NumbersUSA (2020), an anti-​immigration organization, has the following quote from conservationist Dave Forman included in the “environmental concerns” section of their website: Those environmentalists who think we can double or triple US population without wiping out wildlife and scalping our last wildernesses, are living in a fool’s paradise. . . . Americans have the biggest Affluence Footprint per capita of any people in the world. Any population growth in the United States, then, is growth of these big Affluence Footprints. Population growth in the United States is thus more harmful to the world than population growth anywhere else because of our over-​big Affluence.

This passage highlights the affluence and consumption of the United States; however, the policy solutions advocated by NumbersUSA is to limit immigration, not to explicitly reduce consumption. In the context of climate change, the United States has one of the highest rates of carbon dioxide emissions per capita in the international system (World Bank 2020).13 As can be seen in Figure 13.1, population growth levels are being driven by low-​income countries followed by lower-​and middle-​income countries (United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs 2018). These are not the countries that have historically contributed most to climate change, yet we spend a disproportionate amount of time in global climate debates fretting about future emissions levels in those states due to population growth. Our time seems better spent examining the environmental implications of the behavior of the affluent rather than target the socially, politically, and economically marginalized. While the international community has changed a great deal from the time of Thomas Malthus, the continuation of problematic environment and population discourses illustrate that we remain a long way from widely adopting population discourses that are grounded in equity and justice. Several articles published in the past few years have essentially argued that some forms of coercive approaches to population growth are justified for the greater good of avoiding climate change (Hickey et al. 2016; Walters 2007). These pieces use the urgency of climate change to legitimize policies that are ethically dubious in the minds of many. The stakes of “getting it wrong” on population are immensely high and will be borne by those with the least capacity to fight it. Betsy Hartmann (2010a, p. 239) put it well when she argued that “[p]‌laying with fear is like playing with fire. You cannot be sure exactly

254   Nicole Detraz where it will spread.” As social scientists, we have an obligation to think critically about how our work might be used. It is not enough to shrug and say that we had good intentions. Instead, we must reflect on where our research and debate have a great likelihood of being weaponized. Population discourses are one of the clearest examples of work that has huge potential to be used against people, and particularly people who are marginalized and contribute very little to major environmental problems like climate change as individuals. I argue that we must employ justice-​based discourses because climate change is such a crisis. We cannot understand arguments about the behavior of “humans” without recognizing that there are essential gendered, raced, classed, and other differences in human experience and action.14 History has given us countless examples of crisis enabling policies and approaches that would be unthinkable under other circumstances. We must ensure that our climate fears are not used as justification for continued marginalization or even violence in the Global South and within marginalized communities of the Global North.

Conclusion This chapter problematizes population and environment discourses. It draws on research spanning multiple disciplines that shine a light on the constructed nature of population discourses and their consequences. Colonial powers and the international community have employed discourses linking population and environmental degradation for centuries. Not only have these discourses shaped the assumptions of numerous actors about how population trends relate to environmental concerns, they have also influenced policy-​making in both the Global North and Global South. Population policies intended to reduce fertility or curb immigration have tended to have outsized impacts on women, particularly women from marginalized communities. The harshest versions of this Malthusian discourses have fallen out of favor among scholars and most global IGOs and NGOs. However, alternative population and environment discourses remain widely used by these actors. At the same time, additional population and environment discourses have emerged that seek to cast the problem of overpopulation as one that can be addressed by female empowerment. Because population and environment discourses persist in the international community, it is essential that scholars carefully examine the content and implications of these discourses to ensure that policies designed to achieve environmental sustainability do not end up resulting in human insecurity for marginalized groups. Discourses are collective shorthand for understanding the world. They are fluid and malleable, yet we do not often think of them that way. They are the stories we tell that begin to acquire the shine of truth. It is our duty as social scientists to critically examine discourses that have come to be taken by many as unfortunate but unavoidable truth. We must ask ourselves about the implications of casting marginalized women as environmental burdens and ensure that any attempts to “put population back on the table” are met with careful evaluations of where environmental trouble comes from and how best to address it in ways that are both sustainable and just.

Gender and Comparative Environmental Politics    255

Notes 1. In fact, scholars and policy-​makers had traditionally considered a large population to contribute positively to state power (Sciubba, Lamere, and Dabelko 2013). 2. Between 2015 and 2020, the states with the highest average annual rate of change in their total population were Bahrain (4.26%), Oman (4.08%), Niger (3.81%), Equatorial Guinea (3.59%), and Angola (3.28%). By region, Africa recorded the highest average annual rate of change in its total population between 2000 and 2020 followed by Oceania and Latin America and the Caribbean (United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs 2018). 3. Between 2015 and 2020, the states with the highest negative average annual rate of change of their total population were Latvia (−1.03), Bulgaria (−0.67), Croatia (−0.58), Lithuania (−0.55), and Romania (−0.50). By region, Europe had the lowest average annual rate of change of its total population between 1950 and 2020 (United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs 2018). 4. Some have also argued that China’s “one child” policy, which started in 1979—​later adapted to a “two child” policy in 2016—​was heavily influenced by 1960s and 1970s Northern population narratives, particularly the Club of Rome’s Limits to Growth report (Greenhalgh 2003). 5. The environmental conflict storyline has been closely associated with thinkers like Thomas Homer-​Dixon (1999), former director of the Project on Environment, Population and Security at the University of Toronto (known as the Toronto Group). 6. Hartmann (2010a, p. 199) argues that Homer-​Dixon’s work specifically had a large role in this. “His particular rendering of the degradation narrative found its way almost verbatim into speeches of top officials from the White House, State Department, CIA, and US Department of Defense, as well as into many academic, popular, and policy publications on population, environment, and security.” 7. An additional argument says that because immigrant communities “serve as an attractive source of low-​wage labor for many businesses, immigrant populations may inadvertently attract and support the development of industrial and manufacturing sectors of the labor market (e.g., meat processing, textile industries) that tend to contribute to pollution problems” (Price and Feldmeyer 2012, p. 123). 8. The report also included several recommendations about reducing or altering consumption patterns as well (President’s Council on Sustainable Development 1996). 9. Tanton was instrumental in the creation of the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), the Center for Immigration Studies, NumbersUSA, US Inc., the Immigration Reform Law Institute and Journal, the Social Contract, US English, and ProEnglish, as well as provide funding to numerous other immigration restrictionist organizations (Hultgren 2015). 10. John Hultgren (2015) points to US-​based examples like the Sierra Club, Alliance for a Sustainable USA, Californians for Population Stabilization, NumbersUSA, and Progressives for Immigration Reform as using an “ecocommunitarianism restrictionist” discourse. This discourse fits with Lohmann’s (2005) “daytime Malthusianism,” which present links between population change and environmental change in ways that are palatable to multiple communities, including some on the left of the political spectrum that would outright reject works like The Population Bomb.

256   Nicole Detraz 11. Some argue that the population, environmental health, and empowerment discourse serves to co-​ opt some of the language and storylines associated with women’s reproductive health discourses, but in some cases with ultimate goals that are antithetical to women’s agency. Sasser (2018) argues that some of the language of the RJ movement is used by environmental organizations like the Sierra Club; however, they also continue to highlight population growth in the Global South as an environmental “problem.” 12. Population control refers to “top-​down, coercive interventions (often rooted in imperialist foreign policy) that have an explicit goal of lowering birth rates; it designates ideologies shaped by eugenicist and neo-​Malthusian thinking; it delimits an arena of multi-​lateral activity; and it identifies a movement of heterodox actors including neo-​ Malthusians, donors, eugenicists, pro-​natalists, nativists, birth controllers and others who aimed to control the population of the world” (Bhatia et al. 2020, p. 335). 13. In 2016, the United States had 15.5 metric tons per capita carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. Other Global North states had similar levels: Australia (15.54) and Canada (15.09). China recorded 7.18 metric tons per capita CO2 emissions, while India had 1.81 (World Bank 2020). 14. This is why some scholars critique the label “Anthropocene” as glossing over some of these important social, economic, and political realities of human behavior. For instance, see Ojeda et al. (2020).

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Pa rt I I I

M OV E M E N T S A N D AC T I V I SM

Chapter 14

E nvironm enta l J u st i c e , Cl imate Ju sti c e , a nd Animal Libe rat i on Movem e nts Confronting the Problems of Social Difference David N. Pellow Introduction In this chapter, I explore key points of tension and friction between the climate/​environmental justice and animal liberation movements. Animal studies scholars have pointed to the lack of engagement between and among these movements—​as well as the dearth of scholarship on their intersections (Fitzgerald and Pellow 2014; Pellow 2013, 2014, 2017). This chapter charts such crossings and missed opportunities, drawing on the literatures from environmental justice, climate justice, and critical animal studies. My primary contention is that the driving force behind the tensions among these movements is social difference—​in particular, how to engage questions of race, gender, and social class on the same discursive plane as the “animal question” or the category of species (and specifically as a social category). I examine sites and cases where scholars and activists might productively work through these thorny, sensitive, and controversial issues. While these points of conflict will continue to shape interactions and avoidances among key stakeholders in these communities, I argue that they are also a source for advancing intellectual and political agendas. Such opportunities can respond to Stephanie Malin and Stacia Ryder’s (2018) call for “deeply intersectional environmental justice” research. Scholars and advocates must engage these questions in order to develop more robust explanations for the drivers of—​and substantive responses to—​the multidimensional challenges of ecological inequality. I ground this analysis in the concept of “deeply intersectional environmental justice” because it offers a framework for addressing these tensions across movements. The starting

264   David N. Pellow point for this framework is Black feminist legal scholar Kimberle Crenshaw’s (1991) pioneering concept of intersectionality, which refers to the ways in which different systems of oppression and privilege interlock to produce and reinforce inequalities along multiple axes, including race, class, gender, sexuality, age, ability, citizenship, and much more (see also chapters by Detraz; Fuentes George; and Kronsell et al. in this volume). For example, the experience of living in this society as a Black, working class, queer woman is generally very different from that of a Black, middle-​class man, and certainly distinct from that of a White, wealthy, heterosexual man. Thus, being defined as Black or a woman is insufficient to understand the full complexity of one’s identities and one’s experiences with oppression and/​or privilege. That is to say, knowing someone’s race or gender alone cannot capture the range of intersecting social categories of difference that we embody. One of the most enduring and significant lessons from Crenshaw’s work is that various social identities or social categories of difference do not act independently of one another; they interrelate and work together to produce advantages and disadvantages. Thus, scholars should avoid essentializing entire communities and populations because there is a range of complex experiences and identities within each group. What this also means is that oppression cannot be reduced to a single fundamental type of inequality and that we are all multiply situated because we all inhabit many social categories of difference, which makes for infinite possibilities with respect to coalition building to confront oppression in all of its complexities. This applies to environmental justice movements, for example. Malin and Ryder (2018, p. 4) build on Crenshaw’s work (and the broader body of Black feminist scholarship out of which it emerges) and argue that the scholarship on environmental justice studies often avoids examining the ways in which environmental concerns intersect with a range of social identities and power structures that reveal how complex the origins and impacts of environmental injustices are on individuals and communities. They propose a “deeply intersectional” environmental justice methodology, which should “explicitly recognize and iteratively analyze the contextual/​historical, often mutually reinforcing, inseparable, and multiply oppressive structures that intersect to control and dominate marginalized individuals and communities while simultaneously privileging powerful actors.” Malin and Ryder (2018, p. 4) add that “deeply intersectional” approaches to environmental justice scholarship would best be served by a recognition that such injustices are “embedded in, inseparable from, and often exacerbated by particular conditions of social inequality, injustice, and oppression that precede environmental justice concerns.” For Malin and Ryder, these categories and conditions include racism, heteropatriarchy, ageism, ableism, colonialism, nativism, sexism, and much more. Even so, as expansive and critical as deeply intersectional environmental justice is, it stops its reach at the border of the human. Here I argue that we can build out Malin and Ryder’s concept a step further to include species and what scholars have called the “animal question.” If we are engaging in truly deeply intersectional environmental justice scholarship, then any discussion of social difference among humans is always predicated and premised on an implicit (if not explicit) reference point of the nonhuman—​whether that be nonhuman spaces, ecosystems, habitats that constitute “the environment,” or nonhuman animals. The very category of human is understood to be a figure that is explicitly set apart (and usually above) from the nonhuman animal. And the ideas of race and racial difference within the human family are always set against a backdrop of how certain humans—​non-​ Europeans, for example—​have long been defined as closer to nature, more proximal to

Environmental Justice, Climate Justice    265 nonhumans, and/​or as subhumans. The model of the Great Chain of Being, for example, for centuries, claimed that humans were superior to nonhumans and that white Europeans were superior to non-​Europeans (Kim 2015). Moreover, racial differences among humans were historically believed to be driven by environmental causes, thus revealing the many ways in which social categories of difference are—​at least in the popular and historical-​ scientific imagination—​linked to nonhuman bodies and forces. Therefore, I contend that “deeply intersectional” scholarship on environmental topics necessarily must engage with the human/​nonhuman divide. In the next sections, I consider the ways in which movements for environmental and climate justice and animal rights offer lessons for how activists might approach the challenge of deeply intersectional thinking and action in their work.

Social Movements, Disconnections, and Intersections Environmental Justice and Climate Justice Movements The environmental justice and climate justice movements are largely mobilized around a framing that threats to environmental and climate health are also disproportionately impacting marginalized populations around the globe (Bullard 2000; Sze 2020). Specifically, Indigenous people, immigrants, people of color, working class communities, women, disabled, and LGBTQ populations bear the brunt of a range of environmental and climate risks and harms and have the least resources to adapt to and mitigate these threats. These movements have successfully recast environmental and climate concerns as civil rights and human rights matters. These intersections of ecological damage and social inequality gave rise to the terms “environmental injustice,” “environmental racism,” and “climate injustice,” which also underscore the inequitable nature of these phenomena because the communities experiencing those hardships are the least responsible for producing environmental and climate disruptions in the first place. For example, many communities of color are located in close proximity to coal-​fired power plants, which are the leading contributor to global climate change and emit air pollutants that endanger the health of those same communities (whose residents frequently receive little access to the electricity generated by those power plants and pay disproportionately more when they do). Moreover, these movements argue that what might appear to be strictly minoritarian concerns are actually reflective of the driving forces causing our general ecological and climate crises: that is, racism and social inequality are the root causes of environmental disorganization, so it is in the majority’s interest to embrace and support environmental and climate justice (Bhavnani et al. 2019). Many climate justice activists articulate and experience “climate embodiment”—​the myriad ways in which ordinary people are impacted by and respond to the seemingly distant (and hotly contested) issue of anthropogenic climate disruption (Mendez 2020). These leaders from communities on the front lines of the movement also frequently frame their concerns in broader terms, including a critique that maintains that capitalism is the root cause of the climate crisis, thus pushing beyond a traditional environmental movement orientation that tends to work within the existing political economic system (Klein 2014).

266   David N. Pellow Environmental justice and climate justice movement activists are well-​ versed in articulating the myriad ways in which social difference matters to their cause. The majority of their leaders and supporters hail from demographically and culturally diverse backgrounds, and the very framing of their critique and vision of change centers around the ways in which culturally marginalized populations’ experiences and knowledges must be centered. But what these movements have not done so well is to take seriously the ways in which nonhumans have also been deeply impacted by our environmental and climate crises. This is an area of consideration that arises infrequently, and, when it does, it tends to be relegated to a secondary concern that follows a line of reasoning that nonhumans are “also” impacted by ecological and climate crises. For example, nonhumans are invoked in two of the guiding documents of these movements: the Principles of Environmental Justice (Principles 1991) and the Bali Principles of Climate Justice (International Climate Justice Network 2002). These documents were penned by activists seeking to provide a foundation for action that would be far reaching and intersectional, and the Principles of Climate Justice document builds directly on the Principles of Environmental Justice from a decade earlier. With respect to consideration of nonhumans, these documents invoke language in defense of “other life forms,” “a sustainable planet for all living things,” and the “interdependence of all species.” These are generally vague proclamations that fall short of demanding animal rights or liberation, but they do reveal concern for the protection of ecosystems and habitats required for the continued existence of nonhumans. In that regard, the environmental justice movement reflects a similar approach to nonhuman defense as the more mainstream, middle-​class, White environmental movement. Particularly noteworthy is Principle 13 in the Principles of Environmental Justice: “Environmental Justice calls for the strict enforcement of principles of informed consent, and a halt to the testing of experimental reproductive and medical procedures and vaccinations on people of color.” What is fascinating about this demand is that there is no consideration of extending the same protections to nonhumans, when in fact it is nonhuman animals who are routinely subjected to these acts as a core practice of the medical industry. Thus, the environmental justice and climate justice movements have done well at reframing and refocusing what had previously been social causes dominated by White middle-​class activists who tended to ignore the ways in which social inequality and social difference intersect with and drive human society’s impacts on ecosystems, thus transforming environmentalism into a civil and human rights cause. Despite those advances, environmental and climate justice movements have not invested much energy in extending consideration directly to the question of animal rights, indicating that while basic intersectional environmental justice is clearly evident, deeply intersectional approaches have yet to take root.

Animal Welfare, Animal Rights, and Animal Liberation Movements There is a long history of individuals and organizations mobilizing for the protection and defense of nonhumans. In the nineteenth century, English activists like Edward Carpenter (1844–​1929) and Henry Salt (1851–​1939) supported animal rights and vegetarianism. They also variously worked for a range of other causes, including pacifism, LGBTQ rights,

Environmental Justice, Climate Justice    267 women’s rights, and socialism. The Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals in Britain (RSPCA) gained ground at that time, and its American offshoots—​the American Humane Association and the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (SPCA)—​frequently located the solution to animal welfare in changing the attitudes and practices of working-​class society rather than linking animal subjugation to capitalism or other larger social forces. Peter Singer, a philosopher and inspirational figure for the modern animal rights movement, celebrated the significant linkages between early animal protection leadership with women’s rights movements and abolitionist movements (Singer 1975, p. 234). For example, he noted that William Wilberforce and Fowell Buxton, two leaders of the British slavery abolitionist movement, were also co-​founders of the RSPCA. A number of foundational American women’s movement leaders such as Susan B. Anthony, Lucy Stone, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton created enduring connections to both the vegetarian and antislavery movements. By the second half of the twentieth century, the animal advocacy movement evolved from a 1950s era framing of animal abuse as a result of troubling individual behavior to an understanding that institutions—​especially corporations—​and a broader ideological dynamic that permeated American culture were the primary culprits. Moreover, the idea was not just that animal exploitation was ethically objectionable, but that nonhumans themselves were sentient beings who should have rights under law. Since the 1960s through the present, animal rights and animal liberation activists have also drawn inspiration from the civil rights, Black Power, gay rights, and feminist movements to argue that animal rights are the logical end point in the centuries-​long struggles for justice among a spectrum of marginalized populations, be they human or nonhuman. Throughout this period, many animal rights activists have made comparisons between the suffering of nonhumans and humans in order to build support for their cause. For example, Singer (1975, p. ix) wrote, “This book is about the tyranny of human over nonhuman animals. This tyranny has caused and today is still causing an amount of pain and suffering that can only be compared with that which resulted from the centuries of tyranny by white humans over black humans.” And while this sort of framing surely touched and mobilized many people in favor of animal welfare, it also frequently alienated others who felt that it trivialized human suffering due to racism and state violence or created false equivalences. It should also be noted that there are numerous factions and divisions within animal rights movements. Peter Singer is widely viewed as a reformist since he has taken the position that as long as we act to minimize the suffering of animals then humans are free to use nonhumans to benefit society—​a school of thought and politics known as animal welfarism, which is undergirded by the philosophical school of utilitarianism. Groups like the Humane Society and the ASPCA fall under this banner, working to achieve their modest goals through legislation and public education campaigns. Other, more radical activists and scholars rejected this moderate orientation and articulated the position that the use of nonhumans for human benefit or interests is unacceptable under any circumstance. Authors like Tom Regan (2004) and activist groups like the Animal Liberation Front are typically associated with this perspective, widely known as animal liberationists or abolitionists. These groups advocate public education like the welfarists but also occasionally support and sometimes engage in property destruction, arson, and animal rescue/​liberation to achieve their goals and recruit supporters, which puts them into a category of activists that law enforcement has frequently labeled as “terrorists” (Best and Nocella 2004).

268   David N. Pellow If two of the many kinds of animal advocacy strains are welfarists and abolitionists, one organization that has served as a bridge between these different camps of animal advocates is People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA). While PETA is often thought of as an abolitionist group, they have joined with welfarists on many occasions to support animal protective legislation. In fact, PETA is often credited with spearheading the mobilization that led to the passage of the 1985 Animal Welfare Act. With respect to the sensitive topic of social difference, they have turned heads and angered many people with campaigns that distribute images and language comparing eating nonhumans with the treatment of Jews under the Nazi-​led Holocaust, likening the caging of farm animals to chattel enslavement experienced by peoples of African descent, and using nude women to capture the public’s attention. Unsurprisingly, many leaders of Jewish, African American, and feminist organizations have rejected and denounced these practices and the messages contained therein as insensitive and misguided. The obstinacy of PETA’s leadership in refusing to take these issues seriously is fairly reflective of the more pervasive problems of whiteness and heteropatriarchy that have long characterized animal advocacy movements. I interviewed a veteran leader in the animal rights movement (an elderly White man), who told me the animal rights movement . . . overwhelmingly tends to be a movement of highly privileged, primarily white people, with a great deal of economic privilege, who focus on the rights of animals or on issues relating to animals by virtue of the . . . level of privilege that prevents them from needing to address human injustices, and a social status that makes it in their interest to be blind to injustices against humans, because addressing those injustices would mean having to be accountable for their own unearned privileges. And, therefore, looking at animals becomes a way to maintain . . . to be angry about something without having to take accountability for things like race privilege or class privilege or gender privilege. (anonymous interview, June 20, 2010)

Building on that sentiment, a PETA staff member informed me that [b]‌ut we—​you know, a lot of scientists and a lot of people in general kind of still subscribe to this form of Cartesian dualism, where humans are on one side of the spectrum and animals are on the other side. And . . . I don’t see how this is different from, you know, from saying that because someone’s a woman, they’re morally inferior to a man. Or because someone’s Black, they’re morally inferior to someone who’s white. . . . I know that most people who are working on social justice issues for women and minorities are probably offended by the suggestion that—​you know, the fight for animal liberation is similar to the work they do. . . . I think it’s because we haven’t approached them in a way that’s respectful. (anonymous interview with PETA staff member, December 1, 2009)

An animal rights activist who is also a person of color told me [w]‌hen reaching out to those who have been historically disenfranchised, we need to remember where they are coming from and what issues they are dealing with now, as many are dealing with basic survival now. Many are living in communities surrounded by environmental injustice from oil refineries to toxic dumps. These are concerns that many of us take for granted because we do not have to deal with them. They have to worry about things such as just feeding their families. Accepting our privilege, I feel, is . . . .possibly the first step in understanding, and I include myself in this. I am a person of color, but I am a person of privilege

Environmental Justice, Climate Justice    269 who has been able to work in the animal rights movement for over twenty years now. Not for pay, but volunteering my time. (anonymous interview, January 11, 2010)

The divides and rancor within and among animal rights organizations and movements run even deeper in other cases. Paul Watson is the leader and founder of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society (SSCS), a group that emerged after Watson was exiled from Greenpeace as a result of his openly confrontational tactics with seal hunters. Watson and SSCS exemplify the deep divides within the animal rights community because they insist on direct action and placing their bodies between nonhuman animals (e.g., seals and whales) and hunters, while most welfarists are generally content to promote legislation to address these concerns and may not support more adversarial approaches. And because of their work in various marine habitats on campaigns that many observers might define as “environmental” as much as “animal protection,” the Sea Shepherds are a group that serves as a conceptual “bridge” between animal rights and environmentalism. But the animosity between these strands of the movement runs deep and has frequently resulted in shouting matches, profanity-​laced communications, and polarization. In Peter Singer’s classic book, Animal Liberation, he directed harsh criticisms at a number of animal advocacy groups when he noted that the ASPCA, the American Humane Association, and the Animal Welfare Institute were “actively collaborating with those responsible for cruelty” such as rodeos and animal research laboratories, which “lent an air of respectability to practices that ought to be condemned outright” (Singer 1975, p. 231). Finally, animal liberation activist-​scholar Steven Best weighed in on what he sees as the key failures of mainstream animal advocacy: whatever PR gloss one cares to throw on the last few decades of the animal advocacy movement, one has to confront the startling facts that ever more animals die each year in slaughterhouses, vivisection labs, and animal “shelters,” while the fur industry has made a huge comeback. Similarly, after three decades of activity, the animal advocacy movement remains overwhelmingly a white, middle-​class movement that has gained few supporters in communities of color or among other social justice movements. So if we are counting the number of casualties in this war of liberation, to single out one criterion, our side is hardly winning. Over the past two decades, Americans have dropped $40 billion on animal protection issues, some $2 billion a year, as 3,000 volunteer organizations worked billions of hours. And for what? More death and bigger cages? (Best 2009)

These historical and contemporary stories indicate that deeply intersectional analysis and action within animal advocacy movements are still in their infancy. These stories also illustrate how deeply personal and fraught the differences regarding intersectionality can be within and between social movements and their participants. And yet, there are important lessons we can learn from the tensions, differences, and diverse approaches to social change within and across these movements. Holifield, Chakraborty, and Walker acknowledge the increasing diversity of approaches to environmental justice scholarship and advocacy across comparative contexts. [S]‌uch problems as toxic waste, air pollution, depletion or degradation of water resources or threats to biodiversity—​each present distinctive injustices, and for each the meaning of EJ

270   David N. Pellow may look slightly different. Moreover, as much prior work has now shown, the meanings and dimensions of EJ have undergone changes as the concept has travelled to different places. (Holifield, Chakraborty, and Walker 2017, p. 2)

Those diverse meanings and dimensions can facilitate boundary crossing and cross-​ fertilization among movements that have rarely seen points of collaboration until now. For example, while there are signs of missed opportunities for building these linkages (Pellow 2019b), a number of scholars conclude that segments of radical environmental and animal rights movements have converged around an integrated focus on social justice and earth/​ animal liberation in ways that reflect a deep engagement with and application of the concept of intersectionality (Fitzgerald and Pellow 2014; Pellow 2014, 2019a). Therefore, these diverse perspectives within and across animal rights, environmental justice, and climate justice movements might best be seen as a source of potential strength rather than purely as sites of division (see also Jasper and Poulsen 1995). In the following section, I offer a case where environmental justice, climate justice, and animal rights movements could converge and offer resources, energy, expertise, and wisdom for collaborations that would be deeply intersectional and materially impactful.

Proposed Connections and Opportunities for Collaboration: The Case of War Warfare and militarization are practices through which concerns over environmental and climate justice and animal liberation are evident (or at least should be), and these offer opportunities for thinking through deeply intersectional environmental justice.

Warfare as Environmental Threat and Environmental/​Climate Injustice Numerous scholars examining the linkages between warfare and environmental quality have concluded that militarization “is the single most ecologically destructive human endeavor” (Gould 2007, p. 331; see also Brauer 2009; Westing 1976). Furthermore, studies reveal that the world’s armed forces are the largest source of pollution on the planet (Renner 1991). There is a continuum of ecological impacts from the military, including those related to the manufacturing of weapons, the direct effects of military campaigns (e.g., bombing, explosives, etc.), and the massive volume of ecological materials necessary for maintaining military preparedness (also see Weinthal and Sowers chapter, this volume). The relatively recent emergence of nuclear power and atomic warfare has ushered in an even greater degree of ecological harm because, through the development of these weapons of mass destruction, military campaigns are frequently deliberately aimed at creating ecological disorganization in order to make certain places unlivable for humans (Hooks and Smith 2005). The problem of militarization and ecological harm for the United States and the rest of the world is not likely to improve in the short term, unfortunately, as natural resource

Environmental Justice, Climate Justice    271 scarcity is expected to increase and contribute to military conflicts in the future, which will, in turn, amplify threats to ecosystems. In other words, one could say that militarization is both a cause and consequence of ecological harm. The United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) has documented specific ecological harms across a range of war-​torn nations, including, for example, land degradation (Afghanistan), deforestation (Haiti), depletion of fisheries (Somalia), increased threats to wildlife and marine resources (Sudan), the presence of depleted uranium weaponry and military ordnance (Bosnia, Herzegovina, Iraq, Lebanon, Serbia, Montenegro), and threats to drinking water (Occupied Palestinian Territories) (Conca and Wallace 2009). Furthermore, UNEP has also documented significant environmental effects related to human settlements and refugee crises associated with violent conflict, underscoring the impacts on vulnerable human populations (Conca and Wallace 2009). It should also be noted that, in some cases, the indirect effects of militarization have had positive impacts on certain species and habitats when, for example, an exclusion zone was generated (e.g., the Demilitarized Zone between North and South Korea), facilitating population recovery and growth (Lawrence et al. 2015), but there is little question that these improvements are more than offset on a global scale. From a comparative political perspective, one of the significant findings researchers have underscored is that, while war clearly has significant impacts on local ecosystems, the conditions of the pre-​conflict natural and political environments matter a great deal. In other words, in those nations where environmental degradation and/​or political mismanagement of ecosystems preceded war, the impacts of war were amplified that much more. For example, in Liberia, forest degradation was in evidence as a result of agricultural, mining, road construction, fuel production, and logging activities well in advance of violent conflict unfolding in that nation (United Nations Environment Program [UNEP] 2004). Similar dynamics have been observed in Macedonia, where the proliferation of illegal waste dumps and the lack of adequate hazardous waste management contributed to ecological degradation independent of armed conflict (UNEP 2001). Therefore, one conclusion we might draw from these cases is that stronger indicators of environmental protection and democratic governance across various nations might serve to reduce the anti-​ecological impacts of warfare. But these cases also serve to underscore Peluso and Watts’s (2001) conclusion that political violence and its relationship to the environment is best understood through consideration of site-​specific histories and contexts that contribute to such conflict. Unfortunately, while UNEP has paid close attention to this matter, many key international agreements like the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) have paid insufficient attention to these relationships. In total, then, this body of evidence links militarization’s effects across nations, ecosystems, and human and nonhuman communities. There are numerous and infamous examples of the ecological harms associated with warfare. For example, the herbicide Agent Orange was used by US military forces during the Vietnam War to destroy forest cover and agricultural resources that were being used by Viet Cong and North Vietnamese militaries (Westing 1976). The US military dumped an estimated 20 million gallons of Agent Orange and other toxins across landscapes and wetlands in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. This campaign was called Operation Ranch Hand, and it resulted in physical disabilities among thousands of children in Vietnam, massive destruction of forests, and considerable harm to military personnel from all sides of the war (New York Times 2003). The various chemical components of Agent Orange have

272   David N. Pellow infiltrated the soil, water, and aquatic life across various parts of Southeast Asia, persisting in the ecosystem and the bodies of fish for generations (Olson and Morton 2019). Gregory Hooks and Chad Smith (2004) developed the concept of the treadmill of destruction to explain how militarism reflects geopolitical expansionary dynamics and produces environmentally unjust impacts on Indigenous and other vulnerable communities. In particular, they demonstrate that military sites, which are often rife with unexploded ordnance and other toxic substances, are disproportionately located in close proximity to Native American communities—​a clear example of environmental racism. The Dugway Proving Grounds in Utah and the Nellis Range in Nevada are both examples of US military testing sites that directly impacted Indigenous lands and/​or sacred sites. And from the Cold War era through the present, the ecological consequences and social inequalities associated with military activities have been increasingly located and concentrated in the Global South (Hooks and Smith 2012). For example, between the 1960s and the 1990s, France carried out dozens of nuclear tests affecting hundreds of Pacific Island communities, including Tahiti, which affected more than 100,000 people, many of whom developed cancer as a result (BBC News 2014; Kuletz 2002). More broadly, I argue that environmental racism can be reframed as a form of warfare because (1) it usually is occasioned by direct assaults by state and state-​supported organizations on entire communities, (2) it results in considerable negative physiological and psychological consequences for those populations and ecosystems, and (3) it is an effort intended to sustain the well-​being of populations deemed worthy and valuable. For observers concerned about the broader ecological and climate impacts of militarization, the relative size of a nation’s military contributes significantly to increases in energy consumption, per capita carbon emissions, and overall resource consumption (Clark, Jorgenson, and Kentor 2010; Jorgenson, Clark, and Kentor 2010). The US military is the largest consumer of oil on the planet, and all 50 US states’ economies are tightly linked to military industries, thus revealing how the overall American economy is committed to militarization and entrenched in a system that produces massive impacts on climate change (Shearer 2011). Thus, the data and a host of studies from Afghanistan to the Pacific Islands, Sierra Leone, South Africa, Tibet, and more (Downey, Bonds, and Clark 2010) indicate quite strongly that warfare or militarization has devastating impacts on ecosystems and the climate and imposes particularly disproportionate risks on vulnerable human populations (Kuletz 2002; Mishra and Fitzherbert 2004; Saidajan 2012).

Warfare as Species Injustice Militarization and warfare affect nonhuman populations in myriad ways as well. Clark and Jorgenson write: “Military operations and war have long involved the degradation of land and ecosystems—​including scorched earth practices, the diversion of rivers, the destruction of plants (through defoliation) and animals (such as bison on the Great Plains), the burning of oil wells, and the use of chemical and biological weapons” (2012, p. 557, emphasis added). The Hanford Nuclear Reservation, located in Washington State, was a key site for the development of the Manhattan Project—​the US government’s secret program that generated the first nuclear weapons. Studies of the Hanford site’s impacts on nearby salmon

Environmental Justice, Climate Justice    273 and trout populations in the Columbia River reveal significant levels of radiation-​driven genetic mutations in offspring, which poses major threats to the entire region’s ecosystems (Brown 2013). Related studies found similar results in the bodies of predatory birds near the site (Fitzner et al. 1981, p. 56), and other studies have found significant levels of plutonium and other radionuclides in the bodies of deer that roam in the vicinity of the Rocky Flats Nuclear Arsenal in Colorado (Lengefeld 2020). Long before the Cold War, the expansion of civilizations and empires was facilitated by the use of nonhumans as laborers, protein sources, and instruments of war. Elephants, pigeons, camels, pigs, dogs, and horses were all used as tools of warfare during the Age of Antiquity, as the governments of ancient Rome, Greece, Egypt, Syria, China, and India fought to retain and expand control of territory (Morrón 2014). The territorial expansion and influence of the Incan Empire was made possible largely by the use of llamas and alpacas as pack animals and food sources (D’Altroy 2002). Furthermore, the domestication of animals like cows actually promoted large-​scale violence and warfare against human societies because those food systems require considerable space for grazing and water sources (Nibert 2013). Horses and dogs have played particularly important roles in warfare and have paid dearly throughout the centuries. David Nibert writes of World War I: “Thousands of dogs were used as instruments of war by the British, Belgian, Italian, French, and German armies. It is estimated that 68,682 horses and mules were killed ‘in service’ of the US forces alone” (Nibert 2002, p. 71; see also McNeely 1994). The statistics of nonhuman suffering and death during World War II and the Vietnam War are similarly staggering: “it is known that a year after the United States entered the war [WWII] the government announced plans to use 125,000 dogs as guards, mine sniffers, scouts, and tactical fighters. . . . Four thousand dogs were later used as instruments of war by the United States in Vietnam. . . . Of the horses and mules used as tools by the US Army during World War II, more than 243,000 were reported killed” (Nibert 2002, p. 71; see also Cramer 2001 and McNeely 1994). These troubling facts and observations have prompted some scholars to coin the term military-​animal industrial complex to underscore that the “exploitation of nonhuman animals is a key feature of war” (Salter 2014, p. 6). Accordingly, Kenneth Gould (2007) makes a forceful argument for the sociological link between a peaceful world and an ecologically sustainable society. Hence, this growing body of scholarship documents and theorizes the myriad ways in which nonhuman animals have been conscripted into and harmed by warfare in the service of human supremacy and state power for millennia. Combining the insights from both segments of this section, then, warfare and militarization are, I contend, significantly productive sites for illuminating the deeply intersectional linkages between animal rights/​liberation and environmental and climate justice concerns. Warfare produces extraordinary violence against humans and nonhumans alike, while devastating ecosystems, critical habitat, and waterways, and contributing to global anthropogenic climate change. Moreover, the harms that warfare perpetrates against humans are highly uneven across dimensions of race, indigeneity, and class, revealing the relevance of the injustice frame for understanding militarization’s relevance for those grassroots movements focused on social equity through the lens of climate and environment. Movements for animal liberation, environmental justice, and climate justice could conceivably draw on this evidence to advance social change campaigns with considerable policy and material impacts by directing significant resources toward the goals of demilitarization, denuclearization, and peace-​making.

274   David N. Pellow In the next section, I offer a proposed framework for integrating the concerns among animal advocacy and environmental and climate justice movements around the concepts of multispecies justice and abolition.

Discussion and Conclusions: Multispecies Abolition Democracy as a Way Forward At some significant moments, movements for environmental and climate justice and animal liberation have overlapped and articulated shared concerns about the well-​being of vulnerable people, nonhumans, and our ecosystems and climate. But these linkages are few and far between, usually fleeting and made in passing, and therefore lacking in depth and durability. What I have attempted to do in presenting the case of warfare and militarization is to place an issue on the table that clearly and critically impacts the environment, the climate, marginalized humans, and nonhuman animals through means and consequences that are deeply impactful and long lasting. What is curious is how warfare and militarization—​with some notable exceptions—​have generally remained low on the agenda of the climate, environmental, and animal rights movements. Regardless of that fact, the data and trends are clear that war and militarization are sites of real potential for articulating and cultivating common interests and campaigns across these movements in ways that speak to and reflect a “deeply intersectional” analytical, methodological, theoretical, and political orientation that pushes the concept of intersectionality beyond its limited boundary of the human species. For scholars of comparative politics, it would be generative to explore whether, how, and when these intersections and concerns are raised among advocates within any of these movements and to offer an understanding of how these expressions might differ across national and cultural spaces. For example, there are advocacy groups supporting peace, environmental sustainability, and animal protection in the Israeli–​Palestinian conflict (Mountain 2014) and many organizations advocating for an equitable and just solution to the crisis rooted in a focus on a particular human community. But few if any organized interests have worked to bring these issues together in that particular terrain. It would be instructive to understand why this is the case and what factors might contribute to greater intersectional discourses and mobilizations across environmental, climate, and animal justice movements in Palestine, Israel, and elsewhere. Nations with strong traditions of animal welfare and social justice movements might be ideal sites for such comparative explorations, particularly where histories of sectarian violence and militarization are present (such as India). Countries with healthy democratic political traditions and reasonably strong environmental protection policies (including Scandinavian countries) might also be fertile ground for these sorts of studies. What I offer in this closing section of the chapter is a theoretical framework that considers the possibility for thinking through these challenges through the lens of abolitionism and multispecies justice. In a recent interview, prison abolitionist activist-​scholar Angela Davis explains what prison abolitionist movements seek to achieve in the twenty-​first century. She insists that policing and prisons can only deliver the illusion of safety and security: “Safety safeguarded

Environmental Justice, Climate Justice    275 by violence is not really safety. . . . Abolition is not primarily a negative strategy. It’s not primarily about dismantling, getting rid of. It’s about re-​envisioning, it’s about building anew” (Davis 2020). Davis argues that abolition constitutes “a methodological approach of understanding the intersectionality of struggles and issues. . . . Abolition is really thinking about what kind of future we want” (2020). That is to say, prison abolitionists seek to bring into existence a society in which social relationships and institutions are premised on meeting the needs of all denizens through the provision of healthcare, education, housing, food, and other basic requirements for a decent quality of life, with the assumption that doing so will reduce the level of conflict, crime, and the public desire for caging other human beings. Prison abolitionists are necessarily focused on racial, gender, class, Indigenous, immigrant, and LGBTQ justice because the prison systems in the United States and around the world tend to disproportionately target those populations. What can environmental and climate justice activists learn from prison abolition? First, a focus on improving the ability of ordinary people to survive and thrive is a time-​honored way to build grassroots participation and support from the general population. Second, the very populations most negatively impacted by the prison and policing system are the same communities hit hardest by the ravages of environmental injustice and climate disruption, so drawing these connections is a way of doing the important work of movement building. That observation also reflects the reality that climate and environmental justice struggles are never single-​issue concerns—​they are always entangled with multiple social, political, cultural, and economic struggles such as those focused on affordable housing, healthcare, food security, education, etc. Third, prison abolition adopts a much more radical stance on social change and the future than most environmental and climate justice movements, seeking to simultaneously build something entirely new while dismantling and refusing existing socio-​political arrangements. That is precisely what might be needed with respect to challenging—​rather than reforming—​capitalism and racial states, for example. Relatedly, Ranganathan and Bratman (2019) call for “abolitionist climate justice”—​a multi-​issue climate justice politics that addresses historical harms while investing in an ethic of care for those populations most affected by climate disruption. The writings of abolitionist scholars like Davis, Ranganathan, and Bratman are inspired by and rooted in the pioneering work of W. E. B. Du Bois (1935), who coined the term “abolition democracy” to underscore the importance of building democratic and inclusive institutions in order to create sustainable and enduring means of achieving freedom. In Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction, he argued that simply freeing enslaved African Americans via the Emancipation Proclamation would fail to result in more meaningful life chances for that population in particular and for the general public because (1) American society was still built on a foundation and premise of anti-​Blackness and (2) as a nation deeply stratified by race, class, and gender, there was (and remains) an urgent need for creating, building, and supporting democratic structures to provide all people with access to basic needs and rights. Abolition movements come in many forms: while the slavery abolition movement looms large in US and world history, and while the contemporary prison abolition movement has gained steady ground, many animal liberation activists have also called themselves abolitionists. As I have noted earlier and elsewhere, however, there are major limitations to this movement’s claims and methods of change-​making (Pellow 2013, 2014). Claire Jean Kim argues that one of the primary weaknesses of the animal liberationist/​abolitionist

276   David N. Pellow movement is its insistence that the struggles for human rights and racial justice have largely been victorious and that racial oppressions are primarily a problem of the past. Kim specifically laments the movement’s unwillingness to see how anti-​Blackness remains a dominant presence in society more generally and within the animal rights movement more specifically. She writes, Animal abolition’s radical instincts are entirely correct: it is right in its unforgiving critique of welfarism and right in its call for revolutionary change. The problem is not, as is sometimes argued, that it is too extreme, but rather that it is not extreme enough in its conceptualization of the problem, its sense of what needs to be done, and its vision of the future. By delinking their cause from black liberation, substantively if not rhetorically, animal abolitionists have to this point been “doomed to miss what is essential about the situation.” By relinking their cause to black liberation, animal liberationists can . . . achieve a clearer understanding of the structures of power they are struggling against by questioning its continuing humanist assumptions. (Kim 2018, p. 29)

Kim’s work aims to explicitly link racial justice and animal liberation, but there remains a need to more clearly articulate how these threads might converge. “Multispecies justice” or “ecological justice” are terms some scholars are grappling with as a way of addressing this challenge (Schlosberg 2014). Tschakert (2020) frames a vision of multispecies justice in the context of climate and environmental justice movements by pointing out that both of those movements have largely ignored nonhuman well-​being and that a more productive means of addressing our intersecting crises might be achieved by conceptualizing justice “as a matter of relations rather than merely an issue of unfair distribution of harmful emissions” (Tschakert 2020, p. 3). She frames multispecies justice and solidarity around “four types of encounters—​the visual, the embodied, the ethical, and the political—​to sketch a relational justice that involves an assembly of beings with agency with whom to inhabit and deliberate a space of co-​existence while confronting shared vulnerabilities and entrenched histories of exclusion, violence, and erasures” (Tschakert 2020, p. 15). What Tschakert is gesturing toward is the need for a way to realize multispecies justice on the ground, in a concrete material fashion. This idea is closely related to what I have called total liberation, which is an ethic of justice that is inclusive of humans, nonhumans, and ecosystems (Pellow 2014). Building on these ideas, I propose fusing the insights of abolitionists and multispecies justice scholars to offer a vision of what I call multispecies abolition democracy, which I define as those practices, institutions, and structures that enable and facilitate justice for humans and nonhumans in the context of recognizing that since our societies have always been multispecies in character and membership, our polities should be as well. And since abolition democracy was a framework intended for humans only, multispecies abolition democracy builds on that inspiring vision and extends and deepens it to allow for all beings and things to be recognized as members of our societies and that collaboration, rather than exclusion and domination, are practices and ethics that will strengthen our communities in ways that are truly “deeply intersectional” because they involve and include the vulnerable and the privileged within and across the human and species boundaries. For as much as prison and slavery abolitionists have articulated powerful narratives of freedom for people oppressed by institutions that cage and restrict their mobility, that political project is incomplete without a consideration of the fuller range of beings—​nonhumans—​who are also caged and consumed by structural

Environmental Justice, Climate Justice    277 violence. And as much as animal liberationists/​abolitionists have argued forcefully for an end to institutional violence against nonhumans, that political agenda will be necessarily limited in the absence of extending that freedom dream to vulnerable human beings who experience exclusion and othering based on the social categories they inhabit—​practices that are frequently undergirded by ideologies that view such humans as closer to nature (Pellow 2013, 2014, 2017). This is a vision that will require commitment and labor from advocates across movements for animal rights and environmental and climate justice who have thus far only taken modest steps in that direction. But I believe there are important opportunities and a clear and urgent rationale for pursuing that project.

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Environmental Justice, Climate Justice    279 Morrón, Ana Paulina. “Nonhuman Animals as Weapons of War.” In Animals and War: Confronting the Military-​Industrial Complex, edited by Anthony Nocella II, Colin Salter, and Judy K.C. Bentley, 55–​7 1. New York: Lexington Books, 2014. Mountain, Michael. “In Israel-​Gaza War, Animals Pay Price.” July 2014. Earthintransition.org. New York Times. “More Were Exposed to Agent Orange,” April 17, 2003. New York Times. Nibert, David. Animal Rights, Human Rights: Entanglements of Oppression and Liberation. New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002. Nibert, David. Animal Oppression and Human Violence: Domesecration, Capitalism, and Global Conflict. New York: Columbia University Press, 2013. Olson, Kenneth Ray, and Lois Wright Morton. “Long-​Term Fate of Agent Orange and Dioxin TCDD Contaminated Soils and Sediments in Vietnam Hotspots.” Open Journal of Soil Science 9, no. 1 (2019): 1 http://​dx.doi.org/​10.4236/​ojss.2019.91001. Pellow, David N. “Environmental Justice, Animal Rights, and Total Liberation: From Conflict and Distance to Points of Common Focus.” In Routledge International Handbook of Green Criminology, edited by Nigel South and Avi Brisman, 331–​346. Routledge, 2013. Pellow, David N. Total Liberation: The Power and Promise of Animal Rights and the Radical Earth Movement. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014. Pellow, David N. What is Critical Environmental Justice? London: Polity Press, 2017. Pellow, David N. “Eco-​Defense, Radical Environmentalism, and Environmental Justice.” In Routledge Handbook of Radical Politics, edited by Ruth Kinna and Uri Gordon, 107–​120. New York: Routledge, 2019a. Pellow, David N. “Linking Environmental Justice and Climate Justice through Academia and the Prison Industrial Complex.” In Climate Futures: Re-​Imagining Global Climate Justice, edited by Kum-​Kum Bhavnani, John Foran, Priya A. Kurian, and Debashish Munshi, 136–​ 144. London: Zed Books, 2019b. Peluso, Nancy, and Michael Watts (Eds.). Violent Environments. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001. Principles of Environmental Justice. First National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit. October 24–​27, 1991. Washington, DC. https://​www.ejnet.org/​ej/​ pri​ncip​les.html. Ranganathan, Malini, and Eve Bratman. “From Urban Resilience to Abolitionist Climate Justice in Washington, DC” Antipode. 2019. https://​doi.org/​10.1111/​anti.12555 Regan, Tom. The Case for Animal Rights. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. Renner, Michael. “Assessing the Military’s War on the Environment.” In State of the World, edited by Linda Starke, 132–​152. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1991. Saidajan, Abdiani. “Effects of War on Biodiversity and Sustainable Agricultural Development in Afghanistan.” Journal of Developments in Sustainable Agriculture 7 (2012): 9–​13. Salter, Colin. “Introducing the Military-​ Animal Industrial Complex.” In Animals and War: Confronting the Military-​Industrial Complex, edited by Anthony Nocella II, Colin Salter, and Judy K.C. Bentley, 1–​17. New York: Lexington Books, 2014 Schlosberg, David. “Ecological Justice for the Anthropocene.” In Political Animals and Animal Politics, edited by Marcel Wissenburg and David Schlosberg, 75–​89. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Shearer, Christine. Kivalina: A Climate Change Story. Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books, 2011. Singer, Peter. Animal Liberation. New York: HarperCollins, 1975. Sze, Julie. Environmental Justice in a Moment of Danger. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2020.

280   David N. Pellow Tschakert, Petra. “More-​Than-​Human Solidarity and Multispecies Justice in the Climate Crisis.” Environmental Politics. 2020. https://​doi.org/​10.1080/​09644​016.2020.1853​448. United Nations Environment Program. UNEP Final Report: Strategic Environmental Policy Assessment—​FYR of Macedonia. Geneva: UNEP, 2001. United Nations Environment Program. Desk Study on the Environment in Liberia. Geneva: UNEP, 2004. Westing, Arthur. Ecological Consequences of the Second Indochina War. Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1976.

Chapter 15

Civil So ciet y, Net works , and C ontenti on A rou nd Environmenta l I s su e s Jen Iris Allan and Jennifer Hadden Introduction A rich scholarship explores the contentious politics of environmental issues and has traced the evolution of non-​governmental organizations (NGOs) and movements dedicated to advancing environmental causes. Much work in this area has largely focused on establishing the importance of environmental NGOs (ENGOs) in influencing political outcomes at the international level (e.g., Lipschutz 1992; Princen and Finger 1994; Wapner 1996; Keck and Sikkink 1998; Epstein 2008; Betsill and Corell 2008; Arts and Mack 2003; Gulbrandsen and Andresen 2004). This scholarship blazed a path for more recent studies that treat ENGOs as central and influential actors across levels of political activity (e.g., Böhmelt et al. 2014; Downie; 2014; Carter and Childs 2018; Ganz and Soule 2019; Allan and Hadden 2017) as well as for studies that explore the strategic choices of ENGOs as political actors (e.g., Balboa 2018; Brulle 2013; Carmin and Basler 2002; Dalton et al. 2003; Diani 1995; Hadden 2015; Saunders 2004). Taking stock, we can also see that important (but more limited) scholarship has engaged in comparative cross-​national analysis (Böhmelt 2014; Dalton 1994; Rootes 2013) and comparative analysis across multiple issues within the environmental arena (Betsill and Corell 2008; Gulbrandsen and Andresen 2004; Princen and Finger 1994). Acknowledging the uneven coverage of existing work, this chapter will first explore three topics related to describing the evolution of environmental civil society, highlighting important changes in scholarly views over time. First, we show that early work emphasized a relatively small cohort of actors and focused on environmental issues, while more recent work shows a transition to a bigger and more diverse population. Second, earlier work focused on cohesive advocacy networks, whereas more recent work shows these networks to be highly complex. Third, early work emphasized a strategy of expertise-​based advocacy, whereas we see evidence of the growing centrality of contention.

282    Jen Iris Allan and Jennifer Hadden After offering a nuanced description of contemporary ENGO politics, the chapter will reflect on what these developments mean for scholarship in comparative environmental politics (CEP). We highlight three important implications for how scholars study environmental civil society, emphasizing the importance of focusing on events and institutions, the role for social network analysis, and the challenge posed by outcome complexity. Finally, we reflect on where the field can progress and what we consider to be important research frontiers in CEP. We first suggest that evolution in the character of environmental civil society makes it all the more important to reconsider the role of authority and legitimacy in this sphere. Second, we emphasize that too little is known about the environmental sector from a comparative perspective. We particularly emphasize the importance of developing more cross-​national comparative work, particularly in the developing world, as a way of balancing the field’s emphasis on international actors. We also think that work that compares ENGOs to other types of NGOs may be of great value. And finally, we emphasize the need to reconcile our understanding of environmental civil society with the rich and burgeoning literature on private authority to better understand how to achieve just environmental outcomes.

A Very Brief History of Environmental Civil Society Systematic environmental conservation efforts can be traced to the second half of the nineteenth century, culminating in the creation of organizations such as the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds in the UK (1889), the Sierra Club in the United States (1892), and the Nature and Biodiversity Conservation Union (NABU) in Germany (1899). These groups were largely domestic until the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) was founded in Switzerland in 1961, with the mission of capitalizing on public interest to raise funds to support projects identified by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (Schwarzenbach 2011, p. 19). The post-​World War II development of the ENGO sector introduced a number of different elements. Increasing ecological consciousness in the 1960s stimulated the creation of groups focused more directly on pollution issues, including Greenpeace International (1971) and the membership-​oriented group Friends of the Earth International (1971). The landmark 1972 Stockholm Conference spurred the creation of new groups—​especially in the developing world—​by initiating a global dialogue about the balance between environmental and development concerns (Longhofer and Schofer 2010; Hadden and Seybert 2016). The major conventions arising from the 1992 Rio Earth Summit stimulated the creation of new ENGOs and/​or the transnationalization of formerly domestic groups. NGOs also formed a numerous transnational networks to advance their causes during this time, including the Climate Action Network, the Pesticides Action Network, and a variety of regional coalitions. Much of the scholarship to date has focused on these large networks, international ENGOs, or ENGOs campaigning in the Global North. As we note later, our understanding of ENGOs and their evolution in developing countries is more limited (but see Henry, this

Civil Society, Networks, and Contention    283 handbook). Hochstetler and Keck (2007) demonstrate the development and importance of the domestic environmental movement in Brazil, challenging the idea that environmental change comes from abroad. Steinberg (2001), however, shows how in Costa Rica and Bolivia “bilateral activists,” those known and influential at home and abroad, can lead to developing countries undertaking world-​leading environmental policies. More work in this area could be extremely helpful in unpacking the role that transnationalism plays in driving environmental change in the developing world. Environmental civil society also contains a more critical and anti-​systemic component. Echoing environmental justice movement activists, activists in this area began to connect global justice concerns more centrally to the environment in the late 1990s (Hadden 2014). The tension between traditional ENGOs and those actors in civil society with a more critical orientation is often characterized as a major strategic division (Alcock 2008; Berny and Rootes 2018, Fisher 2010, Hadden 2015, Kashwan, this handbook, Smith et al. 2019).

How Should We Think About Environmental Civil Society Today? Acknowledging significant debate on the meaning of the term, we define civil society as “an arena in which people associate voluntarily to advance common interests” (Anheier 2004). This definition has the advantage of working across scales and spaces, encompassing local, purely domestic, transnational, and international activity. In practice, we often reference more abundant literature on international NGOs (INGOs) as a starting point for understanding civil society in the environmental realm. INGOs are independent, nonprofit organizations that work in multiple countries and whose primary aim is to advance their missions at the international level (Martens 2002, p. 282).

A Large and Diverse Population Environmental civil society has been growing and becoming more diverse over time. We can see this by examining data about the number of organizations that are explicitly identified with the environmental sector. Smith et al. (2018) find that the environmental sector grew faster than any other area of activity between 1950 and 2013, constituting 27.1% of the social change INGOs listed in the Yearbook of International Organizations in 2013. Longhofer and Schofer (2010) draw on organizational directories to track the development of domestic and international environmental organizations in industrialized and nonindustrialized countries from 1900 to 1990; their work ends before the critical post-​ Cold War period but suggests a large increase in foundings in the late 1970s and 1980s. Bush and Hadden (2019) similarly document a period of growth in internationally oriented environmental nonprofits between 1992 and the early 2000s in the United States and other developed countries, followed by a more recent stagnation. We can see similar trends by drawing on data about the number of organizations participating in important events to govern environmental issues—​a broader measure of

284    Jen Iris Allan and Jennifer Hadden environmental civil society. In climate change governance, the growth is remarkable. The UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) Secretariat reports statistics on NGO participation. There were 2,628 representatives from non-​state actors present when the Kyoto Protocol was adopted, and 9,411 in Paris 18 years later. Some of these newcomers are effectively tourists, interested in attending historic moments (Hanegraaff et al. 2019), but these groups cannot alone account for the more than tripling of civil society’s presence at UNFCCC meetings. Data are less easily available for the conferences held for other multilateral environmental agreements, but there are suggestions of growing NGO participation in the meetings of the Basel, Rotterdam, and Stockholm Conventions on chemicals and wastes and perhaps other areas (IISD 2019). The growth of attendance is partly related to the rising diversity of civil society actors working on environmental issues. At the 2016 climate conference, ENGOs represented only 37.6% of participating NGOs.1 Muñoz Cabré (2011) identifies 22 categories of NGOs accredited to the UNFCCC from 1995 to 2009. After gaining permission to attend, NGO participation patterns also show considerable diversity, with NGOs with missions related to social issues such as gender, labor, or justice nearly rivalling the participation of their ENGO counterparts for some years (Allan 2018, 2020). Data on the expansion of NGOs in the Global South are more difficult to find, constituting another important research gap. Finger and Princen (2013) report remarkable growth in several countries across Latin America, Asia, and Africa between the 1970s and the 1992 Rio Earth Summit. Asia, they suggest, may house the majority of ENGOs in developing countries. China has attracted particular attention. The first ENGO to register in China was Friends of Nature in 1994, which soon led campaigns to protect endangered species and later was part of the “China River Network,” a broad coalition of Chinese ENGOs campaigning against large-​scale dams (Hildebrandt and Turner 2009). The relationship of ENGOs to the Chinese government is complex, with ENGOs providing expertise and services and navigating the system through informal ties with party officials; the system is both conducive to their influence while also restricting their activities (Hildebrandt and Turner 2009; Ho and Edmonds 2007; Zhan and Tang 2013). The evolution of ENGOs varies across various autocratic regime types as each presents unique opportunities and constraints (Böhmelt 2014).

Network Complexity Our second observation is that ENGO networks have become more complex over time. Early work in this area focused on ENGO networks that were highly integrated and collaborative. Keck and Sikkink (1998) highlighted the importance of “shared values, a common discourse, and dense exchanges of information and services” in the case of the deforestation transnational advocacy network (TAN), setting expectations that other TANs might operate in the same way. Similarly, Wapner (1996) discussed the emergence of transnational environmental activist groups that create a “world civic politics” and influence widespread behavioral change. Other work in this area has revealed the emergence of deep tensions within environmental TANs. Murdie and Davis (2012) conducted a comparative study of the network structure of groups working in different areas of activity, drawing on data from the

Civil Society, Networks, and Contention    285 Yearbook of International Organization from 2002 to 2003. They found that the environmental network is organized into two largely separate components, contrasting with the more integrated human rights and health networks. Hadden (2015) found a similar network structure in the NGO network working on climate change, with divisions between the major environmental advocacy groups and the smaller global justice-​oriented groups, many of whom emerged to represent the growing Southern ENGO community. ENGOs from some countries—​notably the United States and European Union-​level actors—​have long been overrepresented in these networks, both numerically and (arguably) in terms of influence. These findings challenge the idea of the environmental network being cohesive (see also Duwe 2001). Scholarship has also revealed a great amount of unevenness in the distribution of network ties among groups participating in this network. Murdie and Davis (2012, p. 184) found that while the clustering coefficient for the environmental network was higher than for those in other sectors (reflecting a well-​connected core), the average path length in the network was much longer (reflecting that it is harder for peripheral groups to reach one another). This suggests that the environmental network that may be more hierarchical than horizontal. Hadden and Bush (2021) find similar results regarding extensive variation within the environmental population in the number of contacts with other INGOs, arguing that the environmental movement is exceptionally concentrated in terms of financial and relational resources. Balboa (2018) similarly finds that large conservation groups dominate the politics of biodiversity from the local to the global scale. In sum, these findings challenge the idea of the environmental network being organized “horizontally” and support the idea that the environmental sector is organized around a small set of “leading INGOs” (Stroup and Wong 2016). Smaller NGOs and local environmental movements have a role, but one that could be better defined in relation to their larger, more dominant counterparts. There are incentives for lower profile NGOs to specialize in a niche issue (Bush and Hadden 2019). Local movements feel acutely the effects of environmental degradation and fossil fuel extraction. For example, Neville (2021) documents how communities in coastal Kenya or northern Canada mobilize to oppose specific instances of biofuels and fracking, which entails working across geographic scales but maintains a fairly narrow issue focus.

Growing Centrality of Contention Existing scholarship tends to emphasize that ENGOs have become more institutionalized over time as they increasingly work within established institutions to influence environmental outcomes. Many scholars have observed that this trend applies generally across NGOs working in all sectors (Boli and Thomas 1999; Smith and Wiest 2012). But others see institutionalization as particularly prominent in the environmental area (Berny and Rootes 2018). There are a number of potential explanations for why this might be. First, it is sometimes argued that the UN Conference on the Human Environment in 1972 set up an inclusive UN Environmental Programme that helped spur the global norm of civil society participation through institutional channels (Bäckstrand 2006; Hironaka 2014). Second, the functional demands of environmental governance require a lot of technical input and may increase the usefulness of ENGOs to policy-​makers (Tallberg et al. 2018b). Third, and specific

286    Jen Iris Allan and Jennifer Hadden to the European Union, Fagan and Sircar (2015) have argued that the functional need to build a constituency to support the integration of existing environmental directives in the new Member States has led to an especially close relationship with the European Commission. We suspect that by focusing on the “demand” for NGOs, and often using UN and other official meetings as sites for research, we may have somewhat overstated the institutionalization—​and taming—​of civil society. We argue that, in parallel to growing institutionalization, we have seen growing contentiousness on environmental issues. Hadden (2015) draws on coding of media sources and the Earth Negotiations Bulletin to show how the number of protests around climate conferences has increased since 2009 (see also Fisher 2010). As Cheon and Urpelainen (2018) argue, activism against the fossil fuel industry has also exploded globally, and especially in the United States, Canada, and Australia. Waves of youth strikes across Europe and elsewhere, coal project protests in East Asia, and large transnational street demonstrations like the Peoples Climate March and Peoples Climate Strike have dominated the coverage of the environmental sector in both the developed and developing world in recent years. Even in China, where authoritarian restrictions on protest are severe (Teets 2014), protests on environmental issues including air and water quality are increasingly common (Steinhardt and Wu 2016).

How Should We Study Environmental Civil Society? These descriptive observations have implications for how scholars should approach the study of environmental civil society. We highlight three important implications here.

Focus on Events and Institutions Our first methodological point regards defining the boundaries of “environmental civil society.” One approach would be to look to groups that either self-​identify as “environmental” or are identified in institutional sources as “environmental” in order to draw conclusions about aggregate population characteristics. This approach has informed much useful scholarship in the area (e.g., Longhofer and Schofer 2010; Smith and Weist 2012) and has given us great insight into, among other things, how the distribution of these groups varies across countries and over time. Most of this work has focused on the global level. In an important exception, Dalton, Recchia, and Rorschneider (2003) drew a global survey of domestic environmental groups in 56 countries in the year 2000 based on environmental directories, including groups in Latin America, Asia, and the Pacific Rim, to examine the strategic choices of ENGOs. The findings indicate that in both the developed and developing world, the ENGO population is diverse and relies on a mixture of conventional and contentious tactics. More recently, direct action has been adopted by some “rowdy greens” to confront fossil fuel infrastructure (Bradshaw 2015). Our work proposes using environmental events and institutions as a focal point for civil society research (see also Diani 2015). This offers several advantages. First, as noted

Civil Society, Networks, and Contention    287 earlier, environmental events such as national days of action, EU Summits, and UN climate conferences are attracting an increasingly diverse constituency (Hadden 2009). Actors we would not traditionally consider “environmental” are making a large impact on discussions happening within environmental institutions. For example, programs of work on gender and Indigenous rights in the UNFCCC were established after sustained campaigns from gender NGOs and Indigenous Peoples organizations. Much work on environmental justice in the United States and elsewhere is driven by the advocacy of civil rights organizations. We argue that by focusing on NGOs that explicitly define themselves as “environmental,” our empirical view and our theories of contentious environmental politics are limited to a subset of civil society engaged in these issues. For example, Allan (2020) shows how non-​environmental NGOs such as Jubilee South, Focus on the Global South, and the International Trade Union Confederation sought to establish their authority on climate change through creating discursive frames, recruiting powerful allies, and leveraging institutions in the climate regimes. Second, contact through these events and institutions is diversifying the approaches that self-​identified environmental actors are themselves adopting. For example, ENGOs are increasingly including human rights and gender within their campaigns (Allan 2020; Ciplet 2014). The mainstreaming of “climate justice” across many developed-​country NGOs is another good example. This demonstrates that organizational learning is through shared participation in these events. We argue that scholars might otherwise miss these important developments if we did not have a view that encompassed the spillovers from other sectors.

Social Networks Our second methodological suggestion is that scholars of environmental civil society should focus much more on the relationships that exist among actors. Much work has tended to correlate the number of the ENGOs with the likelihood of environmental policy adoption (e.g., Pacheco-​Vega and Murdie 2020). But there is also increasing focus on how the structure of ENGO networks may influence the way they perform. Hadden (2015), for example, shows that divisions in the network of civil society actors working on climate change affected the way the network performed at the time of the Copenhagen Summit. This work also highlights how strategies diffused within this network, demonstrating that network position matters for understanding the adoption of innovations. Similarly, Kapstein and Busby (2013) engage in comparative analysis across issue areas and find that movement coherence is a critical part of success. This approach could be usefully applied to other non–​climate issue areas. The field of environmental politics would benefit greatly from more comparative network analysis (Berardo et al. 2016), both across issues and cross-​nationally. In our view, two of the most useful areas for the application of a network approach would be the conservation sector and the anti-​fossil fuel movement. Such analysis would be particularly useful to help understand (1) the ways in which key issues or frames diffuse among actors in hierarchical networks (Carpenter 2014) and (2) the conditions under which divisions in civil society networks can be strategically useful for some (creating a radical flank effect) and, potentially, overall strategically damaging (undermining one another’s work), thus contributing to a better understanding of complex outcomes.

288    Jen Iris Allan and Jennifer Hadden

Complex Outcomes Finally, we acknowledge here that taking a more complex view of civil society will make it difficult to trace the impact of civil society on environmental outcomes. Betsill and Correll (2001, p. 72) contend that “the notion of NGO influence has two dimensions (1) the intentional transmission of information by NGOs and (2) alterations in behavior in response to that information.” Much research in this field has adopted this approach to study particular campaigns and their impact, such as campaigns on deforestation, biodiversity, loss and damage, and fracking (Keck and Sikkink 1998; Allan and Hadden 2017; Neville and Weinthal 2016; Blasiak et al. 2017). However, our understanding of NGO influence becomes much more complicated when (1) multiple actors are transmitting information to the same targets, (2) all of those actors claim to represent civil society, (3) those actors are using different and competing means to express their claims, and (4) different actors are making different demands. For example, the effectiveness of emotive language and symbols (“mindbombs”) by anti-​sealing activists in Canada varies as the discursive environment becomes crowded with competing claims and approaches, and market prices and media preferences fluctuate (Dauvergne and Neville 2011). Such a situation, which is increasingly realistic, can confound our ability to assess influence. While careful process tracing can sometimes unravel the influence of particular political actors, we acknowledge that studies of civil society influence may be unable to definitively establish causal relationships in such settings. This may lead to the danger of scholars understating the importance of civil society influence when civil society is diverse and outcomes are complex. We caution against such outcomes.

What Are the Research Frontiers for CEP? In light of these reflections, we suggest three important research frontiers for scholars of comparative environmental politics.

Legitimacy and Authority Much work to date explores how NGOs can contribute to the legitimacy of institutions (Nasiritousi et al. 2015; Tallberg et al. 2018a) and, to a lesser extent to date, the basis on which NGOs can claim to speak for a group (but see Kuyper et al. 2017). For example, Tahkokallio and Nygren (2008) found that Costa Rican ENGOs had complex ideas about who they represented in wider civil society. It is this latter strand that we think would benefit from adopting a view that extends beyond a focus on ENGOs. With this lens, we can view legitimacy and authority as resources that are carefully constructed to appeal to a specific audience in a given context. This raises a number of compelling questions. What are the sources of ENGO legitimacy and authority, and how do they connect to influence? Do NGOs select among possible sources of authority for a given audience? With growing transnational movements joining an already diverse global set of NGOs engaged in climate and

Civil Society, Networks, and Contention    289 other environmental crises, who will have the legitimacy to speak for the environment (see Kauffman’s chapter in this handbook)? With what claims? How might internal divisions in civil society (between large and small groups, North and South) affect who speaks and who is heard? The politics among NGOs can, we suggest, influence legitimacy claims and perhaps feedback into cooperation or mutual antagonization. Cooperation and solidarity could dilute legitimacy in at least two scenarios: if NGOs take on causes on which they have a little claim (e.g., ENGOs speaking on forest issues central to Indigenous land rights), and if cooperation entails NGOs making claims that contradict the basis of their legitimacy. For example, as Thew, Middlemiss, and Paavola (2020) show, the justice claims of youth shifted from intergenerational justice claims to solidarity claims highlighting the plight of other groups here and now, potentially undermining their effectiveness as representative of future generations. Conversely, the legitimacy claims of those at the center of the network could influence the politics among NGOs in the network. Centralized networks allow for some NGOs to dominate agendas and make claims which the wider network may not support. There may be a tradeoff: centralized networks could be more effective but at the risk of being less legitimate. Duwe (2001) documents how WWF, Greenpeace, and Friends of the Earth vetted the agenda of the network throughout the 1990s. The dominance of a few conservation NGOs creates the conditions for a “transnational conservation elite” to set agendas and undertake projects based on Western, neoliberal ideas (Holmes 2011). More radical parts of the ENGO network can use these ideas as a basis to attack mainstream environmental movements. Centralized networks could be more prone to questions about their legitimacy and who they speak for by those marginalized in the network. Comparing intranetwork relationships across different networks could help us understand when marginalized actors follow central NGOs or when they question their legitimacy. The claims of central NGOs can also influence cooperation or contention between international and local scales of activity. The authority and legitimacy of leading NGOs does not necessarily travel easily to other issue areas (Allan 2020) or to other scales (Balboa 2018). While INGOs may be able to influence policy, their toolkit of skills does not enable them to effectively implement those policies on the ground (Balboa 2014). For local movements trying to find international support, appealing to the central NGOs’ preferences seems key. For example, the Ogoni people in Nigeria only gained the support of INGOs when they de-​ emphasized their ethnic struggle and instead highlighted the environmental destruction caused by Shell in their homeland (Bob 2005). While we’ve learned much to nuance and add power to the boomerang model put forward by Keck and Sikkink (1998), there is room for comparative work to learn more about how legitimacy and authority are constructed at various scales and among actors in the network.

Private Rule-​Making ENGOs have also taken matters into their own hands. Rather than try to influence governments or boycott corporations, they have directly intervened to conserve natural areas, promote sustainable forestry and fishing, and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Several recent articles have traced the rise of transnational governance as a field of study

290    Jen Iris Allan and Jennifer Hadden (Hale 2020; Roger and Dauvergne 2016). Here, we argue that the rise of private governance is an important research frontier for the study of civil society. We suggest that focusing less on the initiatives themselves and more on the dilemmas and incentives NGOs face in creating and implementing these initiatives can yield new insights into legitimacy and equity in civil society. First, we suggest that private governance may also raise new explorations of legitimacy. The legitimacy of private rule-​making rests on acceptance of the rules themselves. In this context, both input and output legitimacy matter. NGOs are part of the rule-​making process, but the ultimate legitimacy of the rules depends on companies adopting the standards (Cashore 2002). How NGOs navigate this shift—​no longer watchdogs holding states to account but instead scrutinizing the effectiveness of their rules and those of other NGOs—​ can provide a window into the strategic choices of NGOs. Indeed, NGOs often struggle with the choice to target companies or work with them in certification programs, which can create mixed signals to potential corporate partners and perhaps undermine the private governance initiative, as Auld and Cashore (2013) found in the Canadian forestry and fisheries sectors. If an ENGO engages with governments or companies to directly govern the environment but the outcomes are paltry, what happens to the legitimacy of the scheme and, in turn, the NGO? This challenge becomes more acute when we consider that implementation of private initiatives may be uneven across different national contexts. Chan et al. (2018) show that while many non-​state initiatives on climate focus on action in low-​ income and lower-​middle-​income countries, the implementation gap in these countries remains greater. Even among emerging economies, uptake varies. Uptake of the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil certification scheme is stronger in China than India in part due to market forces but also government support (Schleifer and Sun 2018). Second, only a small segment of NGOs take on this work, leading to questions of representation, equity, and accountability. Some of these questions resemble those explored in relation to international development and humanitarian NGOs (e.g., see Steffek and Hahn 2010). Most of these NGOs are based in the Global North (Bulkeley et al. 2014), creating the possibility of an accountability gap between local ENGOs and environmental users and the transnational ENGOs running these projects (Balboa 2018). Conservation and climate practices such as national parks and, more recently, Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+​) projects, have had the support of INGOs. Some of these large NGOs directly implement the projects, putting them in conflict with local NGOs and potentially undermining local environmental knowledge and rights (Aguilar-​Støen 2017; Beymer-​Farris and Bassett 2012; Mathur et al. 2014). When working with local communities, conservation NGOs can face a dilemma, torn between donor demands for a conservation project and local communities’ land tenure and livelihood needs (Aldashev and Vallino 2019). For certification schemes founded through partnerships with corporations, negotiations between the NGOs and companies are a primary driver of rule development and legitimacy (Bernstein and Cashore 2007). Local NGOs and communities are often excluded. Directly engaging in rule-​making and implementation opens new questions of how NGOs navigate competing demands and who they represent and how. Here, there may be fruitful avenues to collaborate with political ecology. Such collaboration could help explore the power-​laden relationships between global and local actors. It could also help uncover how social inequities could undermine the realization of private governance projects capable of protecting nature or reducing emissions.

Civil Society, Networks, and Contention    291

Cross-​Sectoral Analysis Finally, we suggest that scholars of CEP may learn a lot by examining environmental civil society in comparison to the civil society actors working in other issue areas. We think this comparative, cross-​sectoral perspective is a worthwhile agenda for both theoretical and practical reasons and that such research could take place at the national or international level. The first question for such an approach is whether there are, in fact, significant differences across the environmental sector and other sectors of civil society in terms of networks, strategy, and organizations. That such differences exist is not necessarily obvious. All NGOs share some common challenges, such as the need to raise funds, demonstrate their authority to key audiences, and gain access to the countries overseas where they conduct their work (Mitchell and Schmitz 2014). These challenges flow from the legal structure of nonprofit organizations and expose them to common constraints that shape their work. Despite these commonalities across NGOs, Hadden and Bush (2021) find that the international environmental sector is distinguished by having an exceptionally high degree of resource concentration. In comparison to other areas, like human rights or development, the environmental sector is characterized by a small number of groups that have access to a large percentage of the sector’s resources and network relationships. Allan’s (2020) comparison of six NGO networks engaging in climate politics suggests that the environmental sector might be less prone to buck-​passing—​that is, leaving some pressing issues to other NGOs to campaign on—​than other networks. While the human security network actors buck-​pass (Carpenter 2014), and the human rights network largely avoided climate change until after the Paris Agreement was signed (Allan 2020), environmental and other NGOs engage on a wide range of issues, from trade to human rights and development. Theoretically, cross-​sectoral approaches can also help us think about how institutions can shape the strategies of NGOs. Our tendency to study environmental groups and their work precludes a study of how differing institutions can influence similar groups of NGOs. Multiple institutional entry points, issue complexity, political salience, and even the membership of an organization could lead NGOs to select different strategies. NGOs can be influential in expanding regime complexes. Much of the literature on regime complexes neglects non-​state actors (but see Green and Auld 2017). NGOs can link regimes or facilitate cooperation among international organizations in pursuit of their agendas (Orsini 2013). Since we have a good understanding of how NGOs can influence one regime, it is reasonable to expect that they can influence multiple regimes, even linking regimes that were previously unrelated, such as gender and climate change (Allan 2020). The extent of influence that NGOs can exert across forums, the conditions that enable such wide-​ranging influence, and the implications of this possible influence for the fragmentation of environmental governance is a challenging area of cross-​sectoral research. Such descriptive matters also have theoretical and policy relevance because they help us to better understand how useful theory from other issue areas is for the study of environmental politics and, in turn, how generalizable our findings about ENGOs might be to the study of other kinds of groups. With better data, much more could be done to expand this kind of work. There are also practical reasons to expand this kind of work. Stroup and Wong (2016) make the point that organizations are increasingly working across sector boundaries.

292    Jen Iris Allan and Jennifer Hadden Understanding how sectors differ may help us to better understand how the interaction of NGOs in different areas of activity will influence environmental governance (Allan 2018). Moreover, cross-​sectoral analysis might help us to identify whether challenges faced by environmental groups are common or distinctive to this area of activity. For example, Berny and Rootes (2018) identify a number of challenges facing ENGOs “at a crossroads,” including how ENGOs respond to policy failure. Looking at examples from other areas may help us to better understand the options.

Conclusion In sum, we suggest that the study of environmental civil society has been a rich area of inquiry. Such work can be pushed forward through explicit attention to relations among actors in the sector, comparative approaches that examine ENGOs across issue areas or in relation to other sectors of international activity, and through a closer attention to contestation and complexity. We also argue in favor of greater attention to the development and deployment of legitimacy and authority in this arena, focused particularly on the opportunities and challenges of private governance. Doing so may require scholars to address a number of data gaps in the field. In particular, our review suggests that we could benefit from much more scholarship on environmental civil society in the developing world. Our work also highlights that a great deal of our knowledge of environmental civil society focuses on the case of climate change and, to a lesser extent, biodiversity. Broadening scholarly research to other environmental issue areas is critically important. In addition, a greater focus on comparative and relational data would help to advance work in this field, especially given data gaps on the number and type of ENGOs in the Global South. Particular attention should be paid to (1) the role of ENGOs in the developing world, (2) comparative social network analysis across issue areas and countries, and (3) cross-​sectoral analysis that allows scholars to compare ENGOs to NGOs working in other areas. One theme of this chapter has been that work on environmental civil society has been more developed at the international scale than in comparative politics. More attention to comparative politics would be valuable in its own right (as described earlier) but would also strengthen the existing literature in international relations in several ways. First, scholars on TANs would benefit from a greater understanding of the uneven participation of actors from different countries, the distribution of their grievances, and their preferred modes of action. This would help to evaluate the representativeness and legitimacy of TANs as actors in global civil society. Second, scholarship on private governance would benefit from a deeper understanding of the potential (and perhaps perils) of civil society engagement in less developed contexts, offering a fuller appraisal of the possibilities and limitations of this approach. There is a strong “local-​to-​global” aspect of transnational civil society, perhaps bolstered by the ease of information sharing in the modern world. Comparative inquiry can help us better understand these dynamics as they unfold in various institutional contexts.

Civil Society, Networks, and Contention    293

Note 1. UNFCCC Statistics on Non-​Party Stakeholders. https://​unf​ccc.int/​proc​ess-​and-​meeti​ ngs/​part​ies-​non-​party-​stake​hold​ers/​non-​party-​stake​hold​ers/​sta​tist​ics-​on-​non-​party-​ stake​hold​ers#eq-​2

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298    Jen Iris Allan and Jennifer Hadden Wapner, Paul. Environmental Activism and World Civic Politics. New York: SUNY Press, 1996. Zhan, Xueyong, and Shui-​Tan Tang. “Political Opportunities, Resource Constraints and Policy Advocacy of Environmental NGOs in China.” Public Administration 91, no. 2 (2013): 381–​399.

Chapter 16

T im e and Pl ac e i n Clim ate Act i v i sm Three Urgency-​Induced Debates Joost de Moor Introduction The climate movement is distinct from most other social movements by the temporality of its main concern: climate change will have irreversible consequences that will become inevitable as soon as certain tipping points are crossed (e.g., Steffen et al. 2018). This temporality is becoming increasingly palpable as more and more young people today can expect to experience severe climate impacts within their lifetimes. Media and politicians worldwide are increasingly recognizing the severity of the situation and have started favoring terms like “climate crisis” over “climate change.” Against this background, urgency has become one of the most salient driving forces behind and challenges for the climate movement. Yet while this urgency is certainly related to the effects of “basic physics,” it is also a social product. Edensor, Head, and Kothari (2020) argue that while climate science may deal with linear time, what matters sociologically is temporality or the “social and cultural conceptions and perceptions of time” (p. 255). As social movements are constantly involved in the internal and external negotiation of knowledge and meaning (e.g., Eyerman and Jamison 1991), we should thus see the temporality and implied urgency of climate change as a social construct that can be challenged, and not just as a debate about climate science. Taking up this challenge, this chapter argues that three essential debates shaping today’s climate activism can be understood as essentially linked to and driven by a socially constructed sense of urgency (also see Brown chapter, this volume). Each of these debates, as well as a discussion of temporality more generally, provides key venues for taking comparative research on climate activism forward. The first debate discussed concerns temporality in relation to the targets of actions and the role of the state. That is, should climate activists focus on putting pressure on representative governments to solve the crisis, or, given the continued failure of governments to act, has it become time for activists to take matters into their own hands by focusing on do-​it-​yourself (DIY) activism instead? Two emerging forms of climate activism can

300   Joost de Moor be linked to the latter option: direct actions against the fossil fuel industry and grassroots alternatives by which movements get involved in promoting local solutions to the climate crisis. By contrast, recent climate campaigns, such as Fridays for Future (FFF) and Extinction Rebellion (XR) use a potentially even stronger urgency framing as they rally around a “climate emergency” frame that puts the onus back on the state. “Demand action or do it yourself ” is thus a key strategic debate that is to an important extent shaped by temporality. Second, as mainstream approaches to addressing climate change have not delivered required change, debates have intensified about whether the time for incrementalism has run out. Instead, climate activists are increasingly advocating more radical systemic change. At the same time, some question whether radical demands, such as ending the capitalist growth economy, are sufficiently realistic given the amount of time required to realize them. It is argued that the movement should instead focus on what is more readily achievable, possibly buying time for further change in the future. Discussions like these are reflected in commonly used phrases like “the ecologically necessary is politically impossible” (Wackernagel and Rees 1998) and “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism” (Jamison 1994). Temporality is thus a key dimension in debates about the politicization and depoliticization of climate activism (Kenis and Lievens 2014). Third, as the window for effective climate action is slowly closing (or has already closed, according to some), and as consequences of climate change are noticeable across the globe, some claim that we are witnessing a shift from apocalyptic to postapocalyptic environmentalism, or the spread of “environmental activism based on a catastrophic loss experienced as already having occurred, as ongoing or as impossible to prevent, rather than as a future risk or threat” (Cassegård and Thörn 2018, p. 563). For instance, an emerging yet largely unaddressed question is what role climate movements play in shaping society’s adaptation to the consequences of climate change. However, by challenging the temporality of postapocalyptic climate change as excessively pessimistic, many activists have defended a more optimistic outlook to defend an ongoing focus on mitigation. Through these three urgency-​related debates, this chapter uses temporality as a lens to understand key tensions and the significant heterogeneity within today’s climate change movement (CCM), thereby building on recent developments in the study of time in social movements (Gillan and Edwards 2020). The CCM has been defined as “a loose, but nonetheless highly active umbrella structure which is supported, shaped, and used by a multiplicity of civil society actors who are active in climate politics” (Garrelts and Dietz, 2014, p. 7). Such a broad definition captures the wide range of more or less connected or like-​minded groups and individuals working on this topic. Recent work on the notion of “climatization” describes how, in a context in which climate change has become seen as the mother of all problems, more and more issues and campaigns are being defined in terms of climate change to draw on the momentum and legitimacy this topic currently holds (Aykut, Foyer, and Morena 2017; de Moor 2022a). As a result, the label “climate movement” in fact comes to cover multiple movements that over time relate differently to each other across ever-​changing conflict lines (de Moor 2018; Hadden 2015). While this chapter discusses these conflicts in more detail, this diversity also makes it impossible to cover the entire climate movement in a single chapter. In line with my own research focus, the debates presented here primarily refer to climate activism in the Global

Time and Place in Climate Activism    301 North. However, to varying degrees they are relevant in the Global South as well. Arguing that temporalities of climate change are place-​specific (Edensor et al. 2020; Cassegård and Thörn 2018), the chapter moreover develops the argument that temporality can be a useful tool in developing comparative research on climate activism—​especially to build bridges between research on the Global North and South. In the remainder of this chapter, I first provide a brief overview of the (limited) comparative research on climate activism, after which I discuss the three aforementioned urgency-​related debates within climate activism. Throughout this chapter, I point out in what ways comparative research may in the future contribute to our understanding of climate activism, in particular along the lines of these three debates. I conclude by developing a more general argument about the potential of comparative research on temporality in climate activism.

Comparative Research on Climate Activism Comparative research on environmental movements more generally is abundant (for a recent overview, see de Moor and Wahlström, 2022). Some of this research may cover activism related to climate issues. However, an inventory using the online publication database Scopus reveals only seven publications explicitly comparing climate activism across various geographical areas or scales.1 Bomberg (2012) compares the United States and the European Union in an analysis of how features of multilevel systems affect climate activism. Baer and Burgmann (2012) and Rosewarne et al. (2013) both compare the Australian climate justice movement to that in other places. Wahlström et al. (2013) analyze how the prognostic framing of the climate issue (i.e., whether it was framed in terms of climate justice) differed between three parallel protests around the 2009 Copenhagen Climate Summit. Cassegård et al. (2017) look at the way in which the climate movement in the United States, Japan, Sweden, and Denmark is shaped by a back-​and-​forth between their national context and their engagement in the transnational UN climate process. Similarly, Derman (2014) and Henry et al. (2019) found that climate-​focused nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) from countries with more restrictive political opportunity structures are more likely to target international governmental organizations. A recent survey project on the global climate strikes by Fridays for Future compares the individual characteristics, mobilization, and attitudes of protesters across 25 cities in several European countries, the United States, Mexico, and Australia (Wahlström et al. 2019; de Moor, Uba, et al. 2020). Descriptive analyses of these data show patterns of difference and similarity across these cities. For instance, while the distribution of gender and age composition differ considerably between the demonstrations, a focus on the state combined with a skepticism toward governments appears to be a universal feature. Given this limited research, the remainder of this chapter is necessarily based on research that is predominantly not explicitly comparative. Therefore, for each of the three debates discussed, I suggest venues to expand comparative research on climate activism.

302   Joost de Moor

Time to Do It Yourself? According to a leading figure in the Transition Towns movement (one of the most influential grassroots climate actors circa 2010), “If we wait for governments, it’ll be too late; if we act as individuals, it’ll be too little; but if we act as communities, maybe it’ll be enough” (quoted in Kenis 2016). This quote expresses a clear lack of confidence in the ability of states—​alone or in international organizations—​to address society’s main environmental challenges within the time frame dictated by those problems. In response, it promotes what Ulrich Beck (1997) has called “subpolitics.” Ecological crises arguably prove that the state can no longer be seen as the ultimate driver of social change. Instead, all areas of society are affected by and can affect ecological crises, thereby making them “subpolitical” domains. Action forms like consumer boycotts or lifestyle politics therefore become appealing ways to take matters into one’s own hands (Stolle and Micheletti 2013; de Moor 2017). By contrast, some of the earliest climate campaigns were strongly focused on trying to influence government decisions. A Friends of the Earth campaign in the United States between 1979 and 1989 has been considered one of the earliest ones to address climate change and was squarely focused on trying to get the US government on board to address the issue (Rich 2018). Later, the emergence of a broader, self-​identifying climate movement took place around the establishment of the UN’s annual climate summits or conference of parties (COPs) (Hadden 2015). Most notably, the Climate Action Network was founded to internationally coordinate the efforts of NGOs trying to influence global climate summits and for a long time remained the primary network within the climate movement, focusing on putting pressure on official COP negotiations through insider lobbying and outsider demonstrations (Newell 2006). In 2007, it became challenged by advocates of climate justice who formed the alternative network Climate Justice Now!, introducing both more radical analyses and forms of action to the climate movement (Hadden 2015; Fisher 2010). At the national level, notable campaigns also focused strongly on influencing govern­ ments. For instance, the “Big Ask” campaign organized by Friends of the Earth has been seen as instrumental to achieving the UK Climate Change Act—​one of the most ambitious climate legislations of its time, which was later replicated in other countries, including Austria, Denmark, Finland, Ireland, and Sweden (Carter and Childs 2018). A growing list of litigations against the inaction of governments in the face of climate change—​such as the Dutch Urgenda campaign—​represents another clearly state-​oriented tactic in the climate movement (Setzer and Vanhala 2019). While there had long been distrust toward the state, especially in radical climate movement circles, the failed 2009 COP15 Summit in Copenhagen proved a watershed moment for much larger parts of the climate movement to become disenchanted with government-​oriented action forms and in particular with attempts to influence international summits. What, after all, can be won by putting pressure on governments to act if those governments are considered fundamentally unable to deliver, even if they would want to? Ever since, the appropriate distance between the movement and the state has remained under debate, culminating in a new split within the movement’s mobilization around COP21 (de Moor 2018). At the 2015 Paris Climate Summit, some groups continued to lobby the official negotiations, but a large part of the assembled climate movement coalition mobilized

Time and Place in Climate Activism    303 with the intention to ignore the COP itself, instead targeting polluting corporations and promoting “real” over “false” solutions. As one interviewee explained to me at the time: [The goal for COP21 is] to build momentum so that after, you actually have a climate movement that we can go back to fighting battles on the ground, that the UK can go back to fighting fracking, and in other places . . . the Germans can go back to stopping coal. And people go back feeling that we actually do have a movement and it’s not all focused on the UN. It’s focused on what we are doing now. I mean, COP21 has to be about after COP21. That is the big lesson from Copenhagen: not focusing on the fucking talks themselves. (interview conducted with member of Climate Justice Action in 2015)

The perceived reasons for states’ inability to address climate change vary, but a common narrative is that corporate influence—​especially from the fossil fuel industry—​has been able to prevent action. For some activists this has even been a reason to reject the analysis that the state was “unable” to act, arguing that this was precisely how they mask their unwillingness to listen to the people instead of the companies. Nonetheless, it is clear that some of the most remarkable climate campaigns and victories in the aftermath of COP21 can be seen as the climate movement taking matters into its own hands (de Moor 2022a). The anti-​fracking campaign in the United Kingdom continued direct action campaigns at (planned) fracking sites across the country, ultimately contributing to a nation-​wide ban on fracking.2 In Germany, the Ende Gelände campaign mobilized previously unseen numbers in direct actions against coal mines in the country (Sander 2017). In France, the Zone Action a Défendre (ZAD) movement succeeded in stopping the realization of a new airport in Notre Dame de Landes near the city of Nantes,3 and, in the United States, various direct action campaigns managed to—​at least temporarily—​stop the construction of oil pipelines crossing Native American territories and sacred grounds (Estes and Dhillon 2019). Most recently, the Dutch chapter of Friends of the Earth won a landmark court case against Royal Dutch Shell, aiming to force the company to reduce its emissions through litigation. In short, refusing to waste increasingly scarce time by waiting for government action, many of the most emblematic and effective climate campaigns in the Global North across the 2010s became about taking matters into the movement’s own hands by directly stopping fossil fuel industries. This spread of what Naomi Klein (2013) has called “Blockadia” needs to be seen at least in part as the diffusion of tactics from the Global South, where direct action and civil disobedience campaigns had already been key methods of environmental justice campaigning for a long time (Martinez-​Alier et al. 2016). Meanwhile, sustainable consumption and lifestyle politics continued to flourish as increasing numbers of individuals wanted to take environmental responsibility in their everyday lives (de Moor and Balsiger 2019; Thörn and Svenberg 2016; for critiques of this development, see e.g., Maniates 2001). Individuals were found to increasingly focus on sustainable consumption and lifestyle politics (Stolle and Micheletti 2013)—​especially those most skeptical about the state’s ability to address environmental challenges (de Moor, Marien, and Hooghe 2017). Collectives increasingly developed grassroots alternatives as direct responses to climate change and other ecological crises, being more or less explicitly framed as a rejection of waiting any longer for the state’s willingness or ability to respond to demands. However, if a sense of urgency, of not wanting to wait for governments to act, fueled this wave of DIY climate activism, the same sense of urgency has more recently begun to fuel campaigns that put the onus back on the state. In the fall of 2018, two new campaigns

304   Joost de Moor emerged—​Fridays for Future (FFF) and Extinction Rebellion (XR)—​that more than anything else demanded stronger state action on climate change and did so on the basis of an unusually strong message of urgency (de Moor, De Vydt, et al. 2021). Around the time of their emergence, the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC 2018) released a report spelling out in stark terms that the world had 12 years left to take radical climate action in order to have a reasonable chance of keeping global warming below 1.5 degrees or risk a henceforth-​uncontrollable escalation of climatic change. It was this 12-​year window of opportunity that became central to the framing of both groups, who centrally focused on demanding government action on climate change. This return to the state has been framed—​ especially by XR—​as a direct critique of the inefficiency of previous climate campaigns, as well as of the more general tendency to put the responsibility for solving climate change on individual citizens and consumers.

Implications for Future Research While some degree of skepticism toward the state’s ability to solve climate change seems to have become near universal, comparative research is still useful to understand the manifestation of the previous discussion across countries. The political opportunity structure (POS) approach has long shown that taking into account cross-​national and cross-​scalar variations regarding the favorability of political contexts for social movements has important consequences for social movement strategies (van der Heijden 2006). However, few studies have applied this framework to explain the prevalence of state-​and non–​state-​ oriented action forms (however, see de Moor 2016; de Moor and Wahlström 2019). Rather, the focus of research tends to be on explaining the prevalence of more or less radical action forms (e.g., Kriesi et al. 1995). Therefore, some important caveats remain. First, more research is needed to understand how the POS shapes not just how movements target the state, but also whether they do so and under what conditions they are more inclined to rely on DIY tactics. Second, comparative research on POS has mainly focused on states’ openness to movements’ demands (i.e., their input structures), whereas the preceding discussion makes it clear that the states’ ability to get things done might be equally important. Finally, the preceding discussion has mainly been developed in reference to climate activism in Western democracies. Linking it more explicitly to debates about climate activism outside this context presents further opportunities for future research. For instance, Martinez-​Alier et al. (2016) show the prevalence of direct action in environmental justice campaigns in the Global South—​often in non-​democratic settings. How do discussions of urgency and political opportunities shape these action forms, in particular given the distinctive temporality of climate change in places where “the socio-​environmental Armageddon is already here” (Swyngedouw 2013, p. 15)?

Time to Transform? This chapter has so far discussed the kinds of tactics and targets that are motivated by the urgent need to address climate change. It here shifts attention to what this action should

Time and Place in Climate Activism    305 arguably demand or achieve. That is, what kind of change is believed to be needed to ultimately address climate change (and/​or underlying problems), and what kind of change can arguably be seen as realistic to achieve within the time frame dictated by climate change itself? Does the climate crisis call for radical change now, or is there no time to lose on fanciful ideological debates, instead requiring a need for pragmatic reforms? Debates between radicals and reformists have long shaped environmentalism (Doherty 2002). Radicals tend to argue that environmental crises are merely symptoms of the more fundamental problems with the capitalist growth economy and modernism’s anthropocentric worldview, leading them to support ideas like economic degrowth and the promotion of ecocentrism. Some Indigenous perspectives conceive of climate change as related to colonialism (Whyte 2017). On the other hand, reformists are more inclined to support principles of ecological modernization and sustainable development by which the ecological impacts on capitalist production and consumption can arguably be managed through technological innovation and economic incentives. Along similar lines, environmentalism has been defined as being political or post-​political, with the latter defining it in terms of a single global, scientific problem requiring a techno-​managerial solution and the former emphasizing its characterization as a political conflict with winners and losers, competing interests, and ideological struggle (Kenis and Lievens 2014; Chatterton, Featherstone, and Routledge 2013; Swyngedouw 2009). These positions can be understood, at least in part, through questions of time and urgency that are historically specific. On the one hand, the position and meaning of both positions has changed over time. On the other hand, the defense of these positions is related to the temporality of climate change. The radical position was more dominant in the countercultural ecological movement that emerged in the 1970s, while reformist ideas came to dominate environmental discourses during two “post-​political” decades after the fall of the Soviet Union, during which liberal capitalism presented itself as a hegemonic political force (Blühdorn 2014). The emergence of climate justice as an idea in the years running up to Copenhagen had already politicized the climate movement by arguing that addressing climate change necessarily involves competing interests and social conflict, as opposed to the universalizing perspective of “humanity versus carbon” (Kenis and Lievens 2014). Furthermore, the failure of the much anticipated COP15 convinced an ever-​growing part of the climate movement that liberal and market-​oriented reforms would not deliver the radical systemic change needed to avert catastrophic climate change (Chatterton et al. 2013). Hence, according to various authors, we see a gradual dismissal of reformist ideas like sustainable development and a return to more radical ecologist ideas (Lövbrand 2019; Blühdorn 2017). The urgent need for far-​reaching social change spelled out in the 2018 IPCC report on pathways to staying within 1.5-​degree warming has arguably furthered the popularity of transformational rather than reformist environmentalism. While environmentalism has thus long been marked by an internal struggle over radical and reformist approaches, the most recent history of climate activism suggests an urgency-​induced return to embracing the need for more radical social change. Nonetheless, even in radical circles, the difficulty of imagining the realization of radical change within climate scientists’ specified time windows continues to inspire support for less radical ideas that can presumably be incorporated more readily into the existing system. Schlembach, Lear, and Bowman noted in their research on British Camps for Climate Action (CCA) that

306   Joost de Moor One of the reasons why these [post-​political] arguments had such traction within an outwardly anti-​capitalist and anti-​authoritarian space stems from the unique qualities of climate change as a social movement “issue” and a matter of “urgency.” . . . Many CCA activists argued that, with the likelihood of climatic “tipping points” being reached within less than 10 years, there may not be time for the type of radical politics that the Camp officially endorsed, and the perceived long and slow process of dismantling capitalism and replacing it with a more equitable system. (2012, p. 815)

Others have interpreted the CCA along the lines of similar debates on urgency. While McGregor (2015) argued that, within the CCA, “urgency” is also operated to defend radical direct action tactics, Saunders (2012) described how it was used as an argument to divert from the Camp’s radical origins. Quoting one activist, Saunders described how “the camp was being used more as a government lobby tool. The urgency of the situation was making people turn toward the state for solutions” (2012, p. 840). Since these studies of the CCA, research into this topic seems to have withered and is arguably in need of revision. In more recent examples, such as that of XR and FFF, we see, for instance, that temporalities of urgency, such as the groups’ demands that governments declare a “climate emergency,” inspire both radical tactics and demands to go “beyond politics.” While XR defines politics mainly in terms of party politics, they also call to act on science rather than politics, which “was—​and still is—​our vision . . .: citizens learning the truth from experts and combining it with their own lived experience.”4 FFF represents in particular the view that older generations have betrayed younger ones because only the younger generations will live to experience most catastrophic climate impacts. Thus, based on their typical age profile, FFF activists likely experience a distinctly urgent climate temporality. Again we see that, based on their framed urgency of climate change, they demand that politicians “unite behind the science” while refraining from making explicit political demands. In short, the temporality of climate change feeds into wider debates about the appropriateness of radical and reformist approaches. While some argue that our only chance is radical change now, others find this approach unrealistic and prefer to address climate change through reforms, or at least buy time in doing so. At this point, it is useful to briefly introduce a debate that closely relates to temporality and (de-​)politicization. That is, the very production of the “correct” understanding of climate change and its time horizon is itself embedded in the politics of knowledge production (Turnhout et al. 2020; e.g., Goldman, Turner, and Daly 2018). Who has the power to define what is “true” about climate change, and whose knowledge is excluded, directly ties in with whose temporality of climate change—​and by extension, whose response—​is preferred. For instance, while official narratives have long portrayed climate change as a future threat to be managed by ramping up techno-​managerial interventions, many Indigenous communities have already experienced severe ecological and societal breakdown, and climate change for them is but a more recent addition to this pattern (Swyngedouw 2013; Whyte 2017). To address the problem framed in this way puts climate change on a very different time scale and would require much more radical change than the gradual increase of the economy’s carbon efficiency. However, such understandings of climate change are typically outweighed by official “climate science.”

Time and Place in Climate Activism    307

Implications for Comparative Research Debates about urgency force activists to reflect on what is ecologically necessary and politically possible. Yet what is politically possible is time-​and context-​dependent. Democracies are clearly distinct from one another in the extent to which they give access to radical challenges, and this has implications for political activism (Vráblíková 2016). Moreover, what is radical in ecological terms might depend on the progress already made within a country in terms of public opinion and environmental policies, with countries displaying a more developed environmental track record possibly being more open to far-​reaching demands (Fiorino 2011). In other words, the political opportunity structure for radical demands differs between countries, and future research may therefore benefit from exploring which conditions make ambitious climate action seem more viable.

Time to Adapt? As debates about effective strategies continue, some within the climate movement have begun to question whether it is not too late to avoid catastrophic scenarios like a Hothouse Earth and thus whether it is not too late to campaign for avoiding them. As hope and a sense of efficacy present valuable assets for climate activism (Williams and Jaftha 2020), some may therefore have become disillusioned to the point of abandoning the movement altogether. Others, however, have developed what Cassegård and Thörn (2018) have called “postapocalyptic environmentalism”; a type of environmental activism that starts from the assumption that environmental catastrophe is already unavoidable or here, but which nonetheless continues to look for meaningful responses. While research on this topic is still limited, it touches on an urgency-​related topic that goes to the heart of temporality in today’s climate activism. Cassegård and Thörn themselves illustrate their concept using two examples of “cultural activism.” First, the Dark Mountain project was founded by disillusioned environmentalists Paul Kingsnorth and Dougald Hine in 2009. Based on an acceptance that the environmental movement “will not save the planet,” they proposed a cultural project to reinvent what is meaningful and valuable once the end of our civilization is accepted. Ever since the publication of their manifesto Uncivilization, many writers and artists have joined the project with works that explore societal collapse and what might come after. Second, the International Tribunal for the Rights of Nature (ITRN) holds mock tribunals organized by activists to try environmental crimes, in particular against Indigenous people. Again, the aim is not to redress environmental degradation but to cope with catastrophes through the enactment of justice. What both examples show, according to the authors, is that the acceptance of loss can be a wellspring of new forms of activism and new forms of struggles, including attempts to salvage what can still be saved and demanding redress and settling wrongs. By accepting loss, energies can be freed for new battles that are felt to be more meaningful and winnable than those that are lost. (2018, p. 14)

308   Joost de Moor Furthermore, the authors argue that “Accepting loss as a fact may free the imagination to find new ways of adapting to the world.” (2018, p. 14–​15, emphasis added). As such, postapocalyptic environmentalism may also go beyond “cultural activism” to include more practical forms of activism. For instance, if the catastrophe is already here and can thus no longer be prevented, the traditional focus on mitigation that has long dominated within the climate movement may give room for a shift in focus to climate adaptation. This shift has most vocally been promoted by Jem Bendell in his influential work on “deep adaptation” (Bendell 2018), which considers “societal collapse” as unavoidable and therefore asks what it might mean for climate action to focus on how to deal with that collapse and what comes after it. Specifically, it does so around “three Rs”: “Resilience: What is it that we most value and how can we keep that? Relinquishment: What is it that we can give up in order to not make matters worse? Restoration: What can we bring back that has been lost?” (Bendell 2018). Particularly within XR—​which included a chapter by Bendell in its handbook—​these ideas have become influential, even though most of what XR does can be categorized as focused on mitigation (e.g., demanding rapid carbon reductions). Despite the apparent significance of these developments, the role of adaptation within the climate movement has only been examined to a very limited degree. In a research project that is ongoing at the time of writing, I have begun to address this gap in the literature. First, in the previously mentioned global survey of participants in the Fridays for Futures Global Climate Strike of September 2019 (de Moor, Uba et al. 2020), we asked participants whether they thought government action on climate change should focus on mitigation, adaptation or both equally. We found a similar pattern whereby about half the respondents prioritized mitigation while the other half attributed equal weight to both. This suggests that adaptation is emerging on the radar of a substantial part of the climate movement (de Moor 2022b). This willingness among many rank-​and-​file activists to accept adaptation as a movement goal seems to be contrasted by the attitude of many organizers within the movement. In a critique of Bendell’s article, activist scholars Nicholas, Hall, and Schmidt (2020) claimed that his skepticism was based on a on a flawed interpretation of climate science and therefore unwarranted. More importantly, they argue that his text was at risk of undermining the efforts of the climate movement by spreading a sense of hopelessness that would paralyze (potential) activists. In response, Bendell defended most of the scientific claims and presented his own evidence to argue that the Deep Adaptation discourse was in fact deeply motivating to its participants. While the debate may have been especially fierce within XR, the case is certainly not unique. For instance, Simonet and Fatoric (2016) found that especially environmental movement leaders had a negative attitude toward a focus on adaptation because they saw it as fatalistic and as an excuse not to act on climate change because it assumes that consequences can be dealt with later. My own qualitative interviews with climate movement organizers in five European cities (Malmö, Hamburg, Antwerp, Bristol, and Manchester) revealed that some indeed shared this skepticism toward adaptation—​even if they considered the odds of successfully mitigating climate change to be low (de Moor 2022c). Specifically, they argued that as long as there is still a chance—​however small—​to keep global warming within safe limits, all energy should be dedicated to that. Adaptation could always happen when, despite their efforts, it would eventually become necessary, or was seen as altogether fanciful given the enormity of the impact of unmitigated climate change. However, many others were much more willing to consider taking adaptation on board as a goal—​especially

Time and Place in Climate Activism    309 those more experienced activists who had already gone through several cycles of unsuccessful climate mitigation campaigns. For instance, their organizing principles more strongly aimed to build social resilience in the face of climate change, or they focused on resilience-​increasing projects, such as local food projects that would insulate society from the collapse of global supply chains. Despite these ambitions, these activists often continued to prioritize mitigation over adaptation and sometimes even refrained from acting on adaptation altogether out of a sense that it would be difficult to combine with mitigation work. Hence, despite the presumed spread of postapocalyptic environmentalism, the movement for now seems largely unwilling to let go of its traditional mitigation goals. It is clear, however, that competing temporalities (is it too late to mitigate?) are creating deep disagreements within climate movements.

Implications for Comparative Research Notwithstanding important nuances, my research showed continuity in attitudes to adaptation across several European countries. This, however, is likely related to the continent’s relatively limited exposure to the consequences of climate change so far (European Environmental Agency 2017). Case studies from outside Europe show much more developed activism on adaptation. Across the Global South, in places where the impacts of climate change are already more present, many justice issues emerge regarding adaptation to those impacts, which occasionally become the subject of contentious episodes. In general, vulnerable populations are more likely to be exposed to the costs of adaptation measures and less likely to benefit from them or influence related decision-​making processes (e.g., Anguelovski et al. 2016). Case studies show that such injustices occasionally become the subject of mobilizations, such as in India (Chu 2018). Likewise, in the United States, where extreme weather events have become more common as a result of climate change, adaption has become a more contentious issue than in Europe. For instance, Dawson (2019) describes the case of Occupy Sandy, a movement promoting greater social justice in the city’s response to Hurricane Sandy and future storms. Méndez (2020) describes how local environmental justice activists in Oakland made adaptation of vulnerable neighborhoods a central point of their campaign to influence the city’s climate plan. Still, both cases concerned actors that were largely outside the traditional environmental groups that make up the most visible part of the more narrowly defined climate movement, which continues to focus on mitigation. This may be because adaptation raises issues that have typically been outside the scope of climate activism. For instance, discussions of climate justice have long been focused on how mitigation should address global injustices (Bulkeley, Edwards, and Fuller 2014). By contrast, adaptation will likely raise local social justice issues that could put climate activists on unfamiliar political terrain (e.g., around urban planning). Hence, the focus of the climate movement could consequently change substantially. Finally, a shift toward adaptation could lead to a further recentering of the state. That is, while some discuss the role of civil society as “co-​creator” of adaptation (Mees, Crabbé, and Driessen 2017), justice-​oriented critiques have demanded states take up their responsibility to protect, in particular, the most vulnerable communities. Hence, discussions of the “return of the state” and of climate adaptation will likely benefit from a connected approach.

310   Joost de Moor

Conclusion Climate change is inextricably linked to urgency, and the overview presented in this chapter shows that temporality shapes climate activism in at least three key ways. First, it shapes the debate about whether the movement should stop waiting for governments to act, instead taking matters into its own hands through DIY tactics, or instead, whether it is time to stop focusing on small-​scale, incremental, everyday, and DIY action forms to focus instead on large-​scale systemic change that will necessarily involve national governments and international organizations. This relates to the second debate. Namely, does the urgency and scale of the climate crisis mean that we need radical change now more than ever, or does it precisely mean that we do not have time to wait for major changes like “the end of capitalism” and that we should focus on more modest changes that can be achieved here and now? Put differently, should climate action be sped up by depoliticizing it, thereby making it more palatable within the system’s current configuration, or should it focus on (re-​)politicizing it, as radical change now is the only realistic option? Finally, while climate activism has traditionally focused predominantly on mitigation, uncertainty about whether there is still a (meaningful) window of opportunity for averting dangerous climate change has inspired a debate about whether or not it is time to shift focus to dealing with—​rather than preventing—​the consequences of climate change. In short, the unique temporality of climate change fundamentally shapes debates about the goals and strategies of the movement. Each of these debates is ongoing, and especially the latter of the three remains understudied, thus providing opportunities for further research. In particular, comparative research on climate activism has remained surprisingly scarce, thereby limiting our understanding of the contextual dependency of these debates. Throughout this chapter, I have pointed to various possible directions for such research. This research can clearly draw on the wider comparative scholarship on environmental and social movements (de Moor and Wahlström, 2022). In this conclusion, I finally present some more general reflections on temporality and comparative perspectives on social movements that may guide this research further. First, the emerging study of temporality in social movements provides promising venues to expand our understanding of the dynamics discussed in this chapter—​and vice versa (Gillan and Edwards 2020). For instance, Gillan’s (2020) recent work on temporality in social movements suggests that we should understand social movements in relation to large-​scale sociopolitical and historical tendencies, or“vectors”, that combine into “timescapes” that both shape and are shaped by movements. Gillan primarily aims to challenge the tendency to interpret various social movements as short-​lived and discontinuous. He illustrates his theory by arguing that the Global Justice Movement, the Anti (Iraq) War Movement, and the Occupy movement should all be understood in relation to each other and to the “neo-​ liberal timescape,” though each in its own historically unique way. This chapter’s focus on climate activism adds that vectors become relevant as a result of debates within movements. While climate change “itself ” is certainly one vector, its unfolding in terms of severity and reversibility is contested. Moreover, depending on the diagnostic and prognostic framing of climate change (i.e., what is the nature of the problem, and what should be done about it; Wahlström, Wennerhag, and Rootes 2013) different vectors become relevant, producing distinct timescapes and time scales. While for mainstream, reformist approaches the progress

Time and Place in Climate Activism    311 of science and technological “solutions” may present the central vector, for more radical approaches, the longer history and future of capitalism are key. Indigenous perspectives introduce different vectors and timescapes altogether because they challenge the exceptionality of climate change by interpreting it along the lines of a much longer history of colonialism. As Whyte notes, “Indigenous peoples often understand their vulnerability to climate change as an intensification of colonially-​induced environmental changes” (2017, p. 154). More recently, Whyte (2020) has argued that, from the point of view of Indigenous peoples, it is already too late to achieve climate justice because necessary improvements to the relationships between Indigenous peoples and powerful actors like national governments would take too long to develop: “A relational tipping point, in a certain respect, has already been crossed, before the ecological tipping point” (Whyte 2020, p. 1). Such competing interpretations thus introduce different temporalities which shape definitions of urgency, and by extension, goals and strategies. A comparative perspective further underlines the fact that such temporalities must be place specific. According to Cassegård and Thörn, time and space are . . . inseparable; his [(Bakhtin 1981)] concept of the chronotope (time–​ space) implies that a particular conception of time always has spatial dimension and vice versa. Using the concept of the chronotope in the analysis of social movement narratives implies discerning how the collective that acts and moves, be it the nation, the tribe, or Humanity, always implies a particular ordering of time and space.

Thus, what comparative research can add to the discussion of temporalities is how they interact with local conditions, be that in terms of (predicted) impacts of climate change, colonial histories, political opportunities, economic conditions, or civic cultures. More specifically, the concept of the chronotope may help us understand how definitions of what is ecologically disastrous/​necessary and politically acceptable/​impossible (Wackernagel and Rees 1998) are embedded in social constructions of place, temporality, and scale. While to some climate change may be a recent scientific challenge to which there are clear technological solutions and for which the political legitimacy of climate action implies a favorable political opportunity structure, to others it represents an acceleration of centuries of oppression, the solution to which implies both a long-​term uphill political struggle against colonialism and a reliance on traditional ways of adapting to environmental challenges (Whyte 2017). In short, given the importance of temporality and place to climate change, future research on chronotopes is likely to add considerably to our comparative understanding of climate activism. In particular, it may contribute to the much-​needed strengthening of the connection between research on climate activism in the Global South and North, which, as this chapter attests, has remained too far apart.

Notes 1. Used search strings were ‘ “climate activism’ AND compar*,” ‘ “climate movement’ AND compar*,” and “ ‘climate’ AND ‘political opportunity structure.’ ” In addition, the journal Global Environmental Politics was browsed for occurrences of both “climate movement” and “climate activism.” Only comparisons between geographical units or scales were included.

312   Joost de Moor 2. https://​www.theg​uard​ian.com/​envi​ronm​ent/​2019/​nov/​02/​frack​ing-​ban​ned-​in-​uk-​as-​ gov​ernm​ent-​makes-​major-​u-​turn 3. https://​www.theg​uard​ian.com/​world/​2018/​jan/​17/​fra​nce-​aband​ons-​plan-​for-​580m-​airp​ ort-​in-​west-​of-​coun​try 4. https://​exti​ncti​onre​bell​ion.uk/​2020/​04/​18/​to-​go-​bey​ond-​polit​ics-​we-​must-​trust-​the-​ peo​ple/​

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Chapter 17

The C om parati v e P ol i t i c s of Environ me nta l Activism in Ru s sia Strategic Adaptation to Authoritarianism Laura A. Henry In 2019 and 2020, over a 10-​month period, Arshak Makichyan, a youth climate activist, staged a weekly solo protest in Moscow to demand that the Russian government take action on climate change, during which he held signs stating “Global warming equals hunger, war and death” and “Our house is on fire.” Makichyan’s lonely vigils could be seen as symbolizing the Russian population’s low awareness of climate change and the apathy of young Russians as compared to their European counterparts who gathered by the hundreds and thousands in School Strikes for Climate. In fact, given the constraints on political activism in Russia, the “solitary picket” has become a familiar strategy for circumventing rules requiring a permit for collective action. Makichyan’s repeated requests for permission to hold a group protest were denied, and, in December 2019, he spent 6 days in detention for participating in a small group demonstration (Zotova 2019). The solitary picket—​a tactic used widely to protest the arrest of journalists or highlight human rights abuses in addition to environmental causes—​is one of Russian activists’ many innovations as space for public mobilization has become more limited. The evolution of environmental activism in Russia during the past decades illustrates how social movements respond to a political regime’s effort to diminish space for activism as well as to broader economic and technological changes. In the 1990s, during the immediate post-​Soviet period, Russian environmental organizations developed strategies to continue their work in a period of political openness, instability, and economic recession. These strategies roughly corresponded to Hirschman’s ideal types of exit, voice, and loyalty. Environmental organizations could eschew politics all together, adopt a critical stance toward the government while building ties to transnational environmental actors, or partner with the government to achieve environmental objectives. Since that time, many of the conditions that facilitated these strategies have changed, offering a mixed picture for

318   Laura A. Henry environmentalists. In 1999, Vladimir Putin began his long tenure as head of Russia’s political system—​either as president or prime minister—​overseeing the recentralization of Russia’s political institutions through the “power vertical” which concentrates decision-​making authority in the presidency. Prior to more recent economic challenges, Putin also presided over the growth of Russia’s natural resource–​based economy, raising living standards and overseeing the emergence of a consumer economy. In the 2000s, foreign funding for civil society organizations declined sharply even as the government embraced a more coercive approach to shaping social activism, including the 2012 Law on Foreign Agents. At the same time, social media technologies began to provide new platforms and resources to environmentalists—​and also to the government to influence public perceptions and environmental narratives. This chapter examines the development of Russian environmentalists’ strategies of activism over the past decade as a case study of how activists respond to changing political incentives and resource flows. The range of adaptations belies a simple depiction of state repression leading to shuttered nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and low mobilization. Instead, these developments encompass innovation and experimentation as well as disruption and decline. These activist strategies extend and complicate Hirschman’s ideal types in ways that illuminate how environmentalism may endure under authoritarian regimes when voice is repressed. Developments in Russia reflect broader trends in authoritarian regimes such as China, Turkey, Egypt, and beyond, illustrating the potential benefits of comparing environmental activism across cases.

Methodology The evidence in this chapter is based on several extended periods of field work, including participant observation and interviews with environmental activists in 2011 (Moscow, Khabarovsk, Vladivostok, Irkutsk), 2012 (St. Petersburg, Karelia, Nenets Autonomous Okrug), 2014 (Moscow), 2017 (Moscow and St. Petersburg), and more recent personal communications with environmental activists using online communication platforms. Due to potential repercussions from the information shared in interviews, particularly for those working in organizations designated as foreign agents, interviewees have been anonymized. However, when information on environmentalists’ strategies was publicly available—​either on an organization’s webpage or in media accounts—​the NGO is referenced by name. Foreign agent statistics are drawn from a database compiled by the author using the Russian Federation’s Ministry of Justice’s register of NGOs “fulfilling the function of a foreign agent.”1 Further information on each organization was then gathered from NGO websites and self-​published documents, as well as national and local media reports of foreign agent NGOs. This research is in no way exhaustive, but it is intended to elicit examples of adaptation and innovation within the Russian environmental movement in order to explore how strategies of activism change in response to shifts in the political and economic context.

The Comparative Politics of Environmental Activism in Russia    319

The Russian Case in Comparative Environmental Politics: Opportunities and Strategies This chapter poses two questions. First, how has the context for environmental activism in Russia—​specifically narrowing political opportunities and diversifying resource flows—​ altered in the past decade? Second, how have environmentalists adapted to their strategies of activism to these changes? On the first question, I draw on social movement theory to consider how political opportunities and threats, levels and types of resources, and regime discourses encourage some forms of activism and discourage others. To consider how activists, as agents of change, react to new legal-​institutional and economic conditions, I turn to Hirschman’s concepts of exit, loyalty, and voice. I argue that Hirschman’s emphasis on strategic action complements social movement theory’s tendency to privilege structural factors. Combining these approaches highlights the dynamic interaction of environmentalists and other political actors and institutions, illustrating how they mutually construct contemporary activism in Russia. Finally, I briefly suggest the great potential of comparison with cases such as environmental activism in China and the Middle East and North Africa, where environmentalists also struggle to continue their work under authoritarian regimes. Scholars of social movements have long recognized that political opportunities, the level and type mobilization resources, and dominant discourses create incentives and disincentives for activism in a society (McCarthy and Zald 1977; McAdam et al. 1996; Tarrow 1994). McAdam synthesized these insights in the political process model (McAdam 1982), an approach that came to dominate the study of social movements but was also criticized as overly structural (Goodwin and Jasper 2004). The political opportunity structure is the “consistent—​but not necessarily formal, permanent, or national—​dimensions of the political environment which either encourage or discourage people from using collective action” (Tarrow 1994, p. 18). It can be assessed as relatively open or closed to activism on the basis of different political indicators, including the degree of access to the policy-​making process, the availability of elite allies, and the repressive capacity of the state. Protests are likely to occur when there are few opportunities for institutionalized channels of political participation. Social movement organizations channel resources and provide an institutional base to a movement (McCarthy and Zald 1977). Activists’ successful framing of grievances can change the public’s level of concern by articulating the problem and assigning blame (Snow et al. 1986). Moreover, political opportunities, available resources, and persuasive framing are not objective categories but depend on the perceptions of individual actors (McAdam et al. 2001, p. 45). The political process model captures regime characteristics beyond the broad labels of “democratic” or “authoritarian.” All authoritarian regimes adjust laws and resource flows to manage social actors, using carrots as well as sticks (Bogdanova et al. 2018), but they do so in different ways. Simple repression of critics and activists who overstep the boundaries of state-​sanctioned political participation is costly to use extensively and maintain over time

320   Laura A. Henry (Gandhi 2008, p. 77). Thus, regimes look for less costly techniques and may even attempt to co-​opt some kinds of civic activism to achieve regime goals. Regimes can manage public discontent by creating venues where social concerns can be raised and addressed (Gandhi 2008; Svolik 2012) while also shaping the boundaries of acceptable public discourse. Competitive authoritarian regimes attempt to preserve a degree of democratic legitimacy through elections while still constraining civil society. Yet the effort to combine democratic and authoritarian elements within a single regime can lead to tensions in governance, creating dilemmas of when to exert control and when to respond to public concern (Petrov et al. 2014, p. 2). Each regime will resolve this control–​responsiveness dilemma differently. Focusing too narrowly on a regime’s laws and institutions risks structural bias, however, and misses the dynamism of state–​society relations by overlooking how activists themselves participate in creating conditions for activism. Hirschman’s typology of consumers’ responses to discontent with firm performance highlights the role of strategic action. Hirchman asserts that individuals generally have three choices in response to dissatisfaction: exit, voice, and loyalty. They may choose to leave the organization, vocalize their concerns, or simply remain loyal consumers. Since first articulated in 1970, Hirschman’s heuristic categories have been applied to a variety of economic and political situations, including in the post-​communist region (Hirschman 1993; Gehlbach 2006; Gel’man 2010). As Vladimir Gel’man wrote, “the ruling elites can encourage ‘exit’ and/​or discourage ‘voice’ with strategic action” (2010, p. 56), shaping incentives and disincentives that make one of these choices appear more attractive or feasible. While authoritarian regimes generally have “closed” political systems, the wide variety of authoritarian systems offers fertile ground for comparing how specific laws and institutions, resources, and legitimation discourses shape this dynamic interaction. For example, many Arab countries have similarly centralized political institutions and restrictions on NGOs that shape environmentalism. Sowers has identified two strands of environmental activism in Egypt: “managerial networks” focused on policy change and activist networks focused on threats to citizens’ economic or physical well-​being (Sowers 2013). More broadly, across the Middle East and North Africa, popular environmental campaigns developed flexible and adaptive strategies of activism to mobilize broad support even as they confront diverse forms of state repression in authoritarian and hybrid regimes (Sowers 2018; Ozen and Dogu 2020). Within the post-​Soviet region, Central Asian environmentalists have embraced several strategies, such as increasing their leverage by aligning national law with international environmental conventions (Weinthal and Watters 2010) or by mobilizing environmental concern in opposition to an authoritarian regime, as in Kyrgyzstan in 2010 (Wooden 2014). China’s authoritarian regime shares a communist legacy with Russia, but the regimes’ strategies of political and economic development began to diverge in the 1980s. Thus, Chinese environmental activism highlights both similarities and differences to the Russia case. In 2017, China passed an Overseas NGO Management law akin to Russia’s foreign agent law (Plantan 2020), yet the Chinese regime also appears more likely to embrace constructive engagement with environmental NGOs. Recent scholarship finds Chinese environmental organizations are able to influence policy outcomes (Teets 2018; Dai and Spires 2018), with greater opportunities for NGOs that are connected to the party-​state system (Zhan and Tang 2013) or that align their work with official discourses (Zeng et al. 2019). The Chinese government has coopted or partnered with some environmental NGOs to solve problems or demonstrate responsiveness to public concern on issues such as climate change

The Comparative Politics of Environmental Activism in Russia    321 (Schroeder 2008) and waste (Arantes et al. 2020). In contrast to Chinese NGOs’ combined strategy of loyalty and voice, opportunities to collaborate with the state on environmental issues appear to be quite limited in Russia. Protests also continue to play a role in Chinese environmental activism when the regime restricts other forms of participation (Hensegerth and Lu 2019; Sun et al. 2017), as they do in Russia. As ideal types, exit, voice, and loyalty appear to be mutually exclusive choices. However, this useful heuristic may obscure movement across categories or novel combinations of behaviors. Major shifts in political rules and available resources may result in a period of experimentation as environmentalists explore multiple adaptive strategies simultaneously—​ strategies that do not fit neatly within an ideal type or that combine tactics in new ways.

Shifting Environmental Opportunities: Rhetoric and Reality In his December 2016 State of the Nation address, President Vladimir Putin declared 2017 the “Year of Ecology” in Russia. Putin emphasized the role of citizens in protecting the environment. He stated, “It is important to ensure the active involvement of civil society in the resolution of such tasks as the improvement of environmental protection laws, preservation of endangered species of animals and plants, [and] creation of a humanitarian system of care to homeless animals” (TASS 2016). Charging citizens to be active and encouraging volunteerism is a hallmark of Putin’s most recent terms in office. However, not all forms of citizen activism are equally valued. Even as Russians are called on to protect the environment, a number of the most well-​known environmental organizations in Russian have been declared “foreign agents,” seriously disrupting their work. The push-​pull relationship between the Russian government and environmentalists represents a broader tension in how to engage citizens in addressing legitimate environmental concerns while restricting political opposition. This relationship is rooted in patterns of governance and activism that first emerged in reforms of the late 1980s and tumultuous early post-​Soviet period of the 1990s.

The Late Soviet Period and Perestroika Examining the Russian case historically illustrates how differences in the political and economic landscape can influence activism. In the Soviet period, the Communist party controlled most mobilizational resources and tolerated only state-​sanctioned political activism. As a result, loyalty was the default option for anyone who wanted to achieve environmental goals. Organizations such as the All-​Russia Society for the Protection of Nature worked with the party-​state to identify natural areas for preservation, monitor endangered species, and educate children. Weiner argues that some Soviet scientists were able to voice environmental concerns, at the margins, through “scientific public opinion” on state plans for managing natural resources and carrying out ambitious industrial projects (Weiner 1999). Only few dissidents exited the political system through emigration, a difficult and rare option. In the late 1980s, Mikhail Gorbachev’s effort to reform the Soviet system through

322   Laura A. Henry restructuring, or perestroika, offered a somewhat more favorable context for autonomous public mobilization but also precipitated the regime’s collapse. Environmental concerns about issues such as nuclear safety inspired mass demonstrations across the Soviet Union. While the role of environmentalists in ending the Soviet regime should not be exaggerated, environmentalism offered a powerful critique of the planned economy, excessive industrial pollution, and disregard for the natural world (Yanitsky 2010; Dawson 1996; Yanitsky 1993). In the first post-​Soviet decade, despite political instability and severe economic recession, environmental organizations identified three strategies of activism suited to the more open political context and newly available funding from foreign donors to support civil society in Russia (Henry 2010); notably, a number of the major environmental NGOs still active today were founded in the 1990s. First, grassroots organizations worked almost exclusively at the local level, often without legal registration, to address issues of immediate concern to communities or to work on environmental education projects. Grassroots groups relied on volunteer labor and engaged authorities only at the lowest level of governance, if at all. Grassroots environmentalists generally avoided politics, seeing it as a discredited space. Second, government affiliate organizations cooperated closely with the state authorities at all levels to achieve the regime’s environmental protection goals. Often composed of bureaucrats, these groups were at times hard to distinguish from state agencies, although they maintained legal registration as NGOs. Finally, professional organizations, frequently founded by scientists or academics (Yanitsky 2018, p. 24), proposed environmental policy alternatives and monitored the government’s implementation and enforcement of environmental laws. Professional environmentalists have been the locus of expertise with Russia’s environmental movement, often working in collaboration with transnational partners and relying on foreign funding to acquire office space and technology. These environmental experts possessed the resources and experience to make use of limited legal opportunities to advocate for environmental protection through environmental impact assessments, public hearings, and “public control.” A clear exemplar of this style of environmentalism was Aleksei Yablokov, a renowned biologist who became an official advisor to President Yeltsin. After leaving this position in 1993, Yablokov joined a variety of initiatives, including heading up the Center for Russian Environmental Policy think tank in Moscow. Yablokov used his voice to engage the regime, arguing that environmentalists could oppose official policies but must continue to work with the authorities (Rossiiskaia Gazeta 2017). Expert groups contributed to the passage of several major pieces of environmental legislation but were limited by the low capacity of post-​Soviet state institutions to enforce laws in the 1990s and their organizations’ generally weak connection to average citizens. The overlap between these strategies of activism and Hirschman’s ideal types is evident. Environmental organizations could avoid politics all together by working only on local, apolitical issues (a type of exit), partner with the state to achieve its objectives (loyalty), or adopt a critical stance toward the state (voice). Overall, in the post-​Soviet period, voice generally has been a less attractive choice for Russian citizens, with many preferring to exit the political realm all together (Gel’man 2010, p. 57). Yet because “voice” is what we have traditionally seen as activism in the West, professional environmentalists received the most scholarly attention—​and professionalized organizations, with their reliance on foreign grants, have been most directly affected by the contraction of political space for activism in the 2000s.

The Comparative Politics of Environmental Activism in Russia    323

Environmentalism Under Putin: Adaptation and Innovation During Putin’s first two terms as president (1999–​2008), these patterns of activism largely persisted, but the political and economic context began to shift even more dramatically in Putin’s later presidential terms (2012–​present). Putin presided over the recentralization of state authority, which had eroded during the 1990s, as the regime began efforts to more directly “manage” civil society (Gilbert 2016). Russia’s natural resource–​based economy grew rapidly after 1999 as oil prices rose, as did living standards and mass consumption. As the dependence on the extractive sector for government revenue grew, state environmental protection agencies were deinstitutionalized (Mol 2009) and foreign funding for civil society was significantly curtailed. Discourses also changed as Putin oversaw the creation of a regime legitimated by a mix of personalism, nationalist populism, adherence to traditional values, and Russia’s return to the global stage (Fish 2017). The resulting regime has been variously characterized as a hybrid, a competitive authoritarian, or a fully authoritarian regime. Over time, these political and economic changes prompted adaption in environmentalists’ strategies of activism.

Patriotic Environmentalism: Expressing Loyalty Throughout his two decades as Russia’s leader, President Putin has demonstrated his love of nature during actions widely covering by the media—​introducing leopards to the Sochi region before the 2014 Olympics, flying with migrating cranes, and wielding a tranquilizer gun to help scientific researchers tag Siberian tigers and polar bears. The president’s symbolic actions gesture toward Russian citizens’ consistent concern about the environment and resonated with patriotic pride in Russia’s forest, waters, and natural resources. Yet according to Levada Center annual polling from 2000 to 2019, a plurality of Russian citizens, ranging from 40 to 63 percent, believe that the environmental situation in the country has been worsening (Levada Center 2019). In a 2020 Levada poll, Russian respondents ranked environmental pollution as the top global threat for the twenty-​first century (48 percent) with climate change in fourth place (34 percent) (Levada Center 2020).2 Air pollution and household waste were seen as the most serious environmental challenges for Russia (Levada 2020). Putin’s public relations moves signal that there is space for loyal environmentalism in Russia today. Loyalty is a straightforward strategic choice in the current political climate. While environmental NGOs are not routinely included in legislative and regulatory processes, the government has encouraged “ ‘constructive cooperation’ between loyal civil society organizations and the state” (Ljubownikow et al. 2013). In certain cases, environmentalists have been invited to participate in debates with business, such as over Russia’s “best available technology” law (Martus 2017). Environmental NGOs also may be invited to help implement policy, such as by participating in environmental impact assessments to “compensate for the poor performance of formal institutions” (Kropp and Schuhmannn 2016, p. 170). State-​sponsored environmental NGOs, such as “Mestnye,” a young “political ecologists”

324   Laura A. Henry movement founded in 2005, mobilize youth volunteers to clean up recreational spaces and plant trees, among other projects.3 Loyalty as a strategy of activism may provide privileged connections to state agencies, invitations to serve on public councils, and access to environmental information. Organizations also may be awarded contracts for services or win competitive tenders for data collection on threats like forest fires or monitoring of endangered species. Funding for NGOs under the Presidential Grant program has increased significantly in recent years (Laruelle and Howells 2020). Interviewees noted that in earlier years of the grant program only environmental organizations that were seen as “belonging” to the regime or United Russian party received funding; however, in recent years even some green groups critical of the government have received modest funding. The Russian government also created a new category of “socially oriented NGOs” that are eligible for state funding, although this category does not cover most environmental groups (Bindman 2015). The benefit of loyalty for those organizations committed to environmental protection is the opportunity to influence environmental policies under development and their implementation, even if only at the margins. These loyal organizations also live to fight another day, standing ready as reliable partners, available when the opportunity arises to make a more significant contribution to environmental policy. As one environmentalist stated, “The environment cannot wait for the government that we want. We must work with the government that we have.” At the same time, loyal environmentalists may be reluctant to abandon their privileged position, so loyalty can limit voice even in the face of ineffective environmental policies, lending a green veneer to economic development strategies that are unsustainable and failing to address the root causes of environmental problems that impact human health and quality of life.

Repression and the Resilience of Voice Environmentalists who have most clearly exercised voice in the past have been the targets of the 2012 Law on Foreign Agents and subsequent amendments (Federal Law FZ-​121 [2012] and FZ-​129 [2015]) (Dauce 2015; Salamon et al. 2015; Plantan 2020). The law requires noncommercial organizations that receive foreign funding and engage in political activity to self-​identify and enter the registry of groups “carrying out the functions of a foreign agent”—​or be designated as such by the Ministry of Justice. Failure to enter the registry voluntarily results in fines and other sanctions. Once designated a foreign agent, the organization must clearly announce its status on its website, publications, and outreach materials. As of May 2020, there were 71 NGOs on the Ministry of Justice’s foreign agent registry (RF Ministry of Justice 2020), but more than 150 groups had been designated as foreign agents at some point (Skibo 2017).4 The law was widely viewed as a response to the 2011–​2012 protests against voter fraud during which the government accused demonstrators who demanded “Russia without Putin” of receiving payments from foreign adversaries. Russia’s foreign agent law and other laws restricting activism were designed in a global context in which numerous regimes, from Egypt to Cambodia and India, are designing more restrictive NGOs laws (Heiss and Kelley 2017; Brechenmacher 2017; Dupuy et al. 2016). When NGO leaders refuse, on principle, voluntarily to join the registry of foreign agents, government officials may ask the office of the Prosecutor General to audit selected NGOs.

The Comparative Politics of Environmental Activism in Russia    325 These audits quickly made it clear that there was no settled definition of political activity. Technically, the law exempts the preservation of flora and fauna from the definition of “political activity” (Federal law “On amendments to certain legislative acts” 2012). However, environmental groups on the foreign agent registry were cited for activities ranging from public awareness campaigns, organizing conferences to discuss policy options, appeals to the authorities on environmental issues, and reposting an online petition (Tysiachniouk, Tulaeva, and Henry 2018). In one case, an organization was designated as a foreign agent for the actions of a single member who attended a public meeting. Some interviewees claimed not to know exactly why their organization was placed on the foreign agent list—​ the charges were never made explicit or they were given a laundry list of actions, many of which appeared too minor to qualify under the law. Ultimately, the presence or absence of foreign funding seems to be of much greater importance to whether a group is designated a “foreign agent” than any particular political activity. However, foreign funding is a malleable concept as well. Long-​standing ties to Norwegian and Finnish environmental groups, as well as grants from the United States, have been flagged by the Ministry of Justice. In at least one case, receiving support from the Russian Orthodox Church qualified as foreign funding (Regnum 2015). The foreign agent law has targeted some of the most effective, authoritative, and well-​ known environmental organizations across Russia (Servetnik, Album, and Lorentzen 2017).5 In fact, in interviews environmentalists joked that the foreign agent label can be seen as a sign of achievement. An environmentalist in Moscow commented, “It is a badge of honor. It means that we have really been doing serious work, really doing something.” That said, the foreign agent label also creates numerous dilemmas because the term connotates Cold War espionage and activities counter to the national interest, thus undermining the legitimacy of any group tarnished with the label. Interviewees expressed concern that they have been designated “enemies of the people” (vragi naroda). Several NGO leaders said that they had difficulty continuing their work after being listed as a foreign agent. Managing the reporting requirements to avoid fines sapped attention from their primary environmental work, and other NGOs were cautious about cooperating with a foreign agent. The leader of a St. Petersburg NGO on the registry said that they were harassed with frequent calls from the prosecutor’s office in which ambiguous “public complaints” against the organization are relayed but never specified. Some environmental NGOs have tried to comply with the letter of the law, and at least five environmental organizations have successfully left the foreign agent registry after rejecting or returning foreign funding within 3 months of their designation. For example, after receiving a donation from Leonardo DiCaprio to help protect wild salmon spawning grounds, the NGO Sakhalin Environmental Watch returned the funding and, after a prolonged period including a court case, were able to leave the registry (Sakhalin.Info 2017). To this point, no environmental organization has successfully argued in the courts that the foreign agent designation was invalid; instead, they used lawsuits to reduce fines related to violations of the law’s provisions. One group described a case in which their carefully planned arguments failed in the face of what appeared to be a predetermined negative decision in court. Restrictions on the freedoms of speech and right to assembly inherent in the foreign agent law have united some environmentalist and human rights NGOs (Skibo 2017; Van der Vet 2018). More environmental NGOs, such as the Environmental Rights Center “Bellona,” now focus on basic rights issues and provide legal advice to environmental groups

326   Laura A. Henry from across Russia. Russian NGOs labeled as foreign agents also have taken their case to the European Court of Human Rights (Wiersma 2019). Still, environmentalists are pessimistic about the impact of the foreign agent law on the professional, or expert, wing of the movement. The prosecution of high-​profile groups ripples outward to affect the activities of less well-​known organizations. They lament that environmental NGOs “have been weakened by a factor of ten” and are experiencing a “severe crisis.” They also express concern that there is no new generation of young, highly qualified environmental experts who are willing to oppose the government, given the potential costs implied by the foreign agent law.

When Exit Becomes Voice Exit as a strategic choice has a dual character. Exit may take the form of choosing to drop an environmental organization’s legal registration and operate informally, or to emigrate from Russia, voluntarily or under pressure. The foreign agent law has pressured some activists and organizations to exit the political sphere as fines and the lurking threat of prison time have forced a few groups to dissolve. Research carried out in 2017 indicated that one-​third (11 out of 30) of environmental NGOs designated foreign agents officially closed following their inclusion on the registry (Tysiachniouk, Tulaeva, and Henry 2018). Counterintuitively, it is not easy to liquidate an NGO even after being labeled a foreign agent. A St. Petersburg-​based environmentalist stated that it took an entire year to close down his organization due to numerous state verifications of the organization’s assets, including real estate and bank accounts, and an audit of past tax filings. Formal exit through closure of an organization does not always mean that environmentalists are abandoning their work, however. In most cases, environmentalists have devised strategies to continue their activism. Strategies include creating a new, untainted NGO to carry on environmental work or re-​registering as a commercial organization. In one case, an environmentalist leader stated that he formed a commercial organization primarily to establish a social advisory council for the business that would carry on the work of the original NGO. Some groups also have formed close ties with non–​foreign agent NGOs or NGOs abroad, in Germany or the Baltic states, to aid their activities. It is possible to go into a kind of “internal exile” in which environmentalists continue to pursue their goals without legal registration or funding, relying entirely on volunteer labor. “Informalization” allows environmentalists to avoid official scrutiny. In practice, environmentalists often pursue multiple strategies simultaneously, attempting legal compliance with the foreign agent law while also pursuing new strategies of activism. In contrast, emigration is the most decisive form of exit from the regime. Emigration, while clearly a last resort for environmental activists, also can be a means of continuing voice. Hirschman argued that only by remaining a member of an organization—​not exiting—​can one exert influence (Hirschman 1970, p. 38). However, other scholars argued that exit can enable voice (Shain 2005), and technology now provides the opportunity for activists to continue to participate in national politics from afar. Several well-​known examples illuminate “voice after exit.” Nadezhda Kutepova, the founder of the Planet of Hope in Ozersk in Chelyabinsk Oblast, long advocated for compensation for victims of radioactive exposure from the Mayak nuclear processing plant. The organization

The Comparative Politics of Environmental Activism in Russia    327 demonstrated that radioactive waste had significantly contaminated the Techa River and affected residents’ health (Brown 2010). In 2015 Kutepova fled Russia after the NGO was designated a foreign agent and she was accused of espionage in a television documentary that portrayed her as a sinister force attempting to undermine industry in the region (Litvinova 2015). After receiving political asylum in France, Kutepova has continued to work on nuclear issues, meeting with UN representatives to raise the issue of radioactive contamination in Russia. Evgeniia Chirikova, the leader of the 2010 grassroots environmental campaign to save Khimki Forest from road construction, left Russia for Estonia in 2015 (Evans 2012; The Guardian 2015). After emigrating, Chirikova set up the interactive online portal Activatica (activatica.org). The Russian-​language website allows environmental and civic activists to post information about their problems, actions, and successes using maps, photographs, and links to other sources in order to raise awareness, cultivate solidarity, and share tactics. Posts include updates about a movement against a new copper enrichment plant in Chelyabinsk, a public lecture on the illegal seizure of waterfront in Leningrad Oblast, and an attempt to file for a referendum on the construction of a waste incinerator in Moscow Oblast. Both Kutepova and Chirikova illustrate the potential continue to exercise voice after exit.

Local Loyalties: The Politicization of the Grassroots? Much as in the 1990s, grassroots environmentalists do not focus on national environmental laws or transnational issues such as deforestation, biodiversity loss, or climate change. Instead, these local initiative groups often work on tangible problems related to citizens’ daily frustrations or threats to quality of life and public health—​what I have referred to as the “everyday environmentalism” (Henry 2019). These issues range from improper waste disposal to the loss of green space for recreation and air pollution. While these local efforts often start small and remain decentralized, grassroots environmentalists are now able to effectively use technology to publicize complaints and aggregate interests across a broader swathe of the population. They also turn to crowd-​funding to support their efforts (Javeline and Lindemann-​Komarova 2020). Grassroots groups frequently note their disgust with party politics and electoral campaigns as a reason for shunning politics, which is a dirty business (griaznoe delo) or worthless (nedostoino). At the same time, these grassroots environmentalists often employ the language of “loyalty” to make their voices heard. However, their loyalty is to their neighborhood, city, or region—​not necessarily to the federal center. One such initiative based on civic pride—​an explicit love of one’s community—​is Beautiful St. Petersburg (Krasivyi Peterburg). The group originated as a way for citizens to make official complaints about urban blight—​the misuse of public green space, illegal parking, unauthorized advertising. Starting on Facebook and V Kontakte, the leader of Beautiful St. Petersburg developed an app that allows citizens to send information about violations, including photographs, to the relevant authorities from their mobile phones. The group operates almost exclusively online, without legal registration. When it does hold public actions—​such as community assessments of the cleanliness of different city neighborhoods—​it uses volunteer labor. This model of civic engagement has spread, and similar “beautiful city” networks have emerged in at least 10 other locations.

328   Laura A. Henry Grassroots groups can grow into formal organizations. Also, in St. Petersburg, Separate Collection (Razdel’nyi Sbor) began as an initiative to organize recycling around the city in the absence of a public recycling option. The group organizes collection points on the first Saturday of the month to gather materials and deliver them to factories for reprocessing. In 2016, the organization won a presidential grant to carry out its collections. Over time, Separate Collection has united with several smaller initiatives around the city that arose to oppose the construction and siting of new waste incinerators. At public hearings, citizens have challenged incinerator construction by asking how the locations were selected (often in close proximity to residential neighborhoods), why they are not using the newest technology, and why there are few other options for waste management. There are other similar movements addressing the issue of waste, including No More Garbage (Bol’she Musora Net), in St. Petersburg and other cities. These groups seem to embody just the kind of apolitical volunteerism that the regime appears to desire. However, these networks and initiatives are not as marginal to environmentalism as they may first appear. First, these efforts cultivate a new model of active citizenship, often through the positive language of civic pride rather than criticism of the regime. They encourage citizens to think of themselves as having rights and responsibilities. Second, what are at first modest and individual demands can cohere into a broader sense of shared grievance. A leader of one initiative notes that, as the networks grows, participants are able to see that the problems they face are not just on their street or in their courtyard, but exist city-​wide—​and even across the country.

Grassroots Protests: Defending Local Quality of Life At times local environmental concerns prompt protests, although many of these events are small. Tomila Lankina’s dataset on protest actions ranging from demonstrations to mass petitions in Russia, chronicles more than 550 citizen actions with environmental themes from March 2007 to September 2016, approximately 18 percent of events recorded in the database (Lankina 2018). Events ranged from demonstrations in defense of parks and other urban green space, rallies decrying air pollution, protests against landfills, and petitions against nuclear energy. Many of these actions did not garner much attention by media outlets. Most protests were quite small, but a few stand out for their size. For example, in November 2008, more than 1,000 people protested against deforestation in Voronezh. In 2011, in Krasnodar Krai, a similar number came out to oppose an oil and fertilizer shipment facility. In March 2015, Chelyabinsk residents attended a rally to ask officials to address persistent, noxious smog in the city. These protests suggest that institutionalized systems of representation or public complaint have not been responsive to citizens’ concerns. The most highly publicized recent environmental protests in Russia have focused on the preservation of green space and the disposal of waste. In 2019, residents of Yekaterinburg protested against the planned construction of a new Orthodox church in a public park at the city center. Eventually, President Putin ordered the suspension of church construction pending a poll of citizens. Even higher levels of mobilization have been coordinated by the campaign “The Russian North Is Not a Dump,” based in the Arkhangelsk and Komi regions, which opposes the construction of a facility for the long-​term storage of Moscow’s waste in the remote territory of Shies. In 2018 and 2019, a series of protests were held in the two

The Comparative Politics of Environmental Activism in Russia    329 regions bordering the proposed facility, as well as in Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Nizhny Novgorod, with slogans such as “Moscow, keep your waste at home” and “We will save the north together.” Environmentalists are challenging the project in the courts as well as the streets; their efforts appear to have played a role in the resignation of the Arkhangelsk governor (Nilsen 2020). Shies hosts just one of several planned landfill sites to be constructed to receive Moscow’s waste. In the future, President Putin “has pledged to build 220 waste processing plants across the country by 2024. His plan calls for 60 percent of Russia’s solid household waste to end up at those plants” (Gershkovich 2018). These plans are likely to elicit further protests by grassroots actors who find that, due to the centralization of Russia’s political system and the deference of Russia’s regional leaders to the president, they need to make their voices heard at the national level if they are to achieve their goals. Dmitri Shevchenko of the Environmental Watch of the Northern Caucasus has commented on the need for environmentalists to be heard at the top of the “power vertical” to get results. He argues that “most of the high-​profile defensive victories of the ‘green’ community in the recent past are connected not so much with mass protests, but with competent lobbying work, campaigns publicizing the problem, or leveraging international influence” (Shevchenko 2017, p. 18). However, historically, this kind of “cabinet activism” focused on elite decision-​makers means that environmental NGOs were not deeply rooted in their local communities—​which he cites as one reason there was so little outcry when environmental NGOs were labeled foreign agents by the Ministry of Justice. Recent protest activity is an opportunity to bridge the gap between environmental NGOs and concerned citizens, creating an environmental movement that looks more like a “layer cake,” implying coordination of groups working across Russia’s regions at different levels (national to local) and with different legal statuses (registered to unregistered).

Authoritarianism and Social Movement Innovation As the political instability of the 1990s has given way to a more centralized and more authoritarian political regime, Russian environmentalists have adapted their strategies of activism. Social movement theory draws attention to political opportunities that shape activism, and the Russian case suggests that greater attention to scholarship on varieties of authoritarianism may offer insight into how different regimes manage the repression–​responsiveness dilemma. Russian environmentalism exhibits some intriguing similarities to movements in the Middle East, North Africa, and Central Asia, where activists similarly navigate hybrid and authoritarian regimes by developing different strategies of activism. Moreover, a preliminary comparison with China indicates that the Russia government has been less inclined to co-​opt environmentalists in order to achieve technocratic goals and more likely to confront and repress activists who articulate environmental critiques. This may be a legacy of the late Soviet experience, in which environmentalists were among those who questioned the fundamental legitimacy of the Soviet system (Dawson 1996). However, a simple story of state repression misses the dynamic nature of the struggle as well as environmentalists’ continued agency. Those environmentalists who have most

330   Laura A. Henry capably exercised voice historically have been most directly targeted by Russia’s current regime through the threat of lost legal status and foreign funding by the foreign agent law. Environmentalists who lead NGOs designated as foreign agents have creatively adapted to new circumstances as they continue to pursue environmental goals. As a strategy, voice remains the costliest option, but, when effective, it has the highest impact by influencing national policy. The model of voice—​providing policy alternatives and monitoring the government’s enforcement of its own laws—​that emerged at a certain political juncture in Russia’s history, primarily in the 1990s and early 2000s, generally failed to engage the broader public, however. The erosion of this model of activism, while disruptive, may provide space for new forms of environmentalism to emerge. The government’s repression has intended and unintended consequences, weakening some forms of activism but also prompting experimentation and innovation. Pressuring regime critics to exit—​either by abandoning the political sphere or emigrating from Russia—​appears to benefit the regime. Yet, given new technologies, emigration may provide a platform for voice, and even grassroots activists lacking formal organizations can use social media to create networks of concerned citizens. Loyal environmentalism is obviously desirable for the regime, creating a few potential partners for the government, but loyalty in the form of citizens’ patriotic sentiment can provide a motivation for voice—​especially when that patriotism manifests at the regional, local, or neighborhood level. New models of “everyday environmentalism” seem more likely to increase the ranks of citizens who consider themselves environmentalists than experts dispensing policy alternatives. By addressing small problems in an apolitical way in order to better the community, many citizens are finding a path toward exercising a type of voice. Russians who have sincerely embraced the call for active citizenship and who want to address environmental issues locally may become frustrated, and even politicized, when opportunities for routine participation are limited. What many environmentalists have discovered is that, in order to be effective, they must challenge entrenched patterns of thinking among citizens that lead to a sense of disempowerment, not merely address environmental problems directly. As one environmentalist stated, “The problem is as much the pollution of the mind as it is the pollution of the earth.” Another echoes this point, stating, “Raising the environmental awareness of citizens—​that is the most sustainable form of environmentalism.”

Notes 1. The registry is available at the RF Ministry of Justice webpage: http://​unro.minj​ust.ru/​ NKOF​orei​gnAg​ent.aspx. 2. In the survey, respondents were allowed to select more than one threat. 3. More information available at http://​www.mest​nye.ru/​. 4. Other notable changes include the 2012 expulsion of USAID, a major funder of civil society in Russia, and the 2015 Law on Undesirable Organizations, which prohibits foreign or international NGOs seen as a threat to national security, including the National Endowment for Democracy and the Open Society Institute, among others. Environmentalists note that foreign financial support for their activities had lessened significantly even before 2012, as many foundations and government agencies turned their attention to issues in

The Comparative Politics of Environmental Activism in Russia    331 other parts of the world. However, the new laws pushed some donors out of Russia and made the possibility of accepting foreign funding less tenable. 5. WWF-​Russia and Greenpeace-​Russia appear less vulnerable to the foreign agent law due to their affiliation with international NGOs. Greenpeace-​Russia is registered as a branch organization of Greenpeace-​International. WWF-​Russia is registered as a Russian organization but has adjusted its financing to insulate itself from the foreign agent law.

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Chapter 18

Angl o F e a rs

Rejection of Climate Change and Anglo Anxiety Peter J. Jacques Introduction Anthropogenic climate change (ACC) threatens human and non-​human communities with some existential threats now and in the future. About 97% of scientists researching ACC agree that that human emissions of greenhouse gas (GHGs) are driving warmer temperatures that will cause important negative impacts (see, e.g., Cook et al. 2016, Doran and Zimmerman 2009) and more than 90% of biophysical non-​climate scientists concur (Carlton et al. 2015). However, the Climate Change Countermovement (CCCM) has organized to cast doubt on these scientific facts of the consensus position. This rejection is climate denial. In fact, denial is widespread internationally, though it is found asymmetrically within and between countries. This chapter explores the politics of climate denial from a comparative perspective to gather deeper insight into climate politics. A comparative perspective demonstrates that the CCCM is conspicuously confined to a single ideology in a small group of countries. If there were legitimate problems with climate science, then the complaints against it would be far more widespread (and not to mention a major debate in the academic literature, which is not the case). As such, these remarkable facts betray the political goals of the climate denial organization. Climate denial originates in and is mainly organized from the “Anglo” group of countries. Anglo countries are the wealthy, English-​speaking, primarily Protestant former British colonies with institutionalized white power: Australia, Canada, New Zealand, South Africa, the United Kingdom, and the United States, although New Zealand and South Africa do not host as much climate denial (see Dispensa and Brulle 2003; Chetty et al. 2015, regarding New Zealand). The United States and, secondarily, the United Kingdom, are the most important climate denial host countries. There are good reasons to think that the Anglo group is not coherent nor does it share a strong cluster of values and interests (see, e.g., Egri et al. 2012), but when it comes to climate denial the Anglo grouping appears

336   Peter J. Jacques to fit. Initially, I viewed climate denial as a Global North phenomenon protecting imperial capital accumulation and fighting distributional justice (Jacques 2008), but it has become clear that Anglo countries are more important than others in the Global North (e.g., continental Europe). For example, German news present “political consensus about the need to limit emissions” even if there is social conflict about the effectiveness, but the US “media emphasise political controversy—​about the need to limit emissions and occasionally about climate change’s impact on humans” (Tschötschel, Schuck, and Wonneberger 2020). Why? I posit here that privilege gained through Anglo hegemony—​perhaps even an Anglo-​ American empire—​is experiencing precarity and deep anxiety about the persistence of imperial privilege. The changes to the international social order commensurate with changing the energy base of industrialized countries—​their industrial power—​endangers an Anglo privileged identity. Of industrialized countries, the Anglo countries may have the most privilege to lose. The CCCM social countermovement organizations (SCOs) target global environmentalism and climate science because the CCCM perceives that these groups set the metaphorical noose around carbonized industrial power, evident in the geography and CCCM narratives. Concretely, I explore selections from climate denial books that express this existential anxiety. But first, I discuss the label of denial, explain some literature on the CCCM and the geography of the CCCM, and discuss the possibility of an Anglo-​American/​ American Empire that has organized and enforced a hydrocarbon-​dependent neo-​liberal economic order that is threatened by climate change and climate mitigation.

The Importance of Labels The rejection of basic climate science, in whole or in part, goes by several controversial terms. The Associate Press (AP) style guidelines argue that, “To describe those who don’t accept climate science or dispute the world is warming from man-​made forces, use ACC doubters or those who reject mainstream climate science. Avoid use of skeptics or deniers” (Colford 2015). However, scholars have debated this issue. Some agree with the AP that “denier,” “has the pejorative ring of Holocaust denier” (Colford 2015), such as O’Neill and Boykoff (2010) who, in a response to Anderegg, Prall, Harold, and Schneider (2010), favor “climate contrarian” because “denier” incites polarization. Anderegg, Prall, and Harold (2010) counter O’Neill and Boykoff by arguing that the term “contrarian” would fuel polarization. Lahsen (2008) reserves “contrarian” for outspoken credentialed leaders of climate rejection. However, at this point, scholars and the AP agree that the term “skepticism” conveys the inappropriate impression that rejecting climate science is neutrally waiting for more evidence, just as any solid scientist normally would. Furthermore, Mason (2020) argues that climate denial is a “willful hermeneutical ignorance” where ignorance is deliberately preserved and deemed virtuous in the face of evidence. Elsewhere, I make the case for using “denier” because there are actually useful connections to Holocaust denial, evident in the Holocaust denial research (Jacques 2012). At first, this sounds like a simple “blind moral insult” (Lang 2010) meant to polarize. However, literature on Holocaust denial shows that denial is a regular “historiographical category,” not an “occasional deviant narrative” (Lang 2010). Thus, by definition, there have been many

Anglo Fears   337 occasions when denial is used, and the term is not singularly tied to Holocaust rejection. At this point, it appears that most scholars studying the phenomenon have indeed settled on “denial/​denier.” Likewise, Lipstadt (2012) explains that there is an architecture to Holocaust rejection that sounds familiar as a historical category. Lipstadt notes that Holocaust denial (a) is a movement, (b) defends an ideology under threat, (c) hides its true objectives, and (d) sows confusion through assertions that seem legitimate to the public. Furthermore, there is a logical bridge between the two projects. Holocaust denial was organized by an international movement of National Socialism who wanted fascism to remain a viable political option in Europe, and they figured the Holocaust cast a pall on their designs, staining the ideology and marring its appeal. They figured that if they seeded lies—​that the Holocaust never happened—​publics would be more open to fascism in the future. The goal obviously was epistemologically disingenuous, just as CCCM goals are not really about problems of science at all. Likewise, the projects are similar in that they both assume that if the Holocaust or ACC were true, protecting what produced them is untenable. Like Holocaust denial, the rejection of ACC is very organized as a countermovement. The CCCM is opposed to the global environmental movement. It emerges in defense of contemporary conservative ideology, is articulated as debunking “junk science” but is really about interrupting socioeconomic change, and it makes claims that have confused a large proportion of the US and other Anglo publics, often using spokespersons who have never conducted climate science.1 It fits neatly in Lipstadt’s general theory of denial. It is, therefore, entirely appropriate to discuss this countermovement as climate denial. In later sections, I add two more reasons that “denial” is more appropriate than other terms.

The Climate Change Countermovement Climate denial rejects or casts doubt on the warming trend, the attribution of warming to human GHGs, and negative impacts expected from warming, but it does so to defend the current political-​economic system and the privilege generated by it. The CCCM is organized through conservative think tanks (CTTs), foundations, and industry groups—​SCOs mainly found in the United States, and then in the United Kingdom. Social movements are collective, interactive campaigns for social change (Tilly and Wood 2013/​2016). Working toward change typically means that social movements, their organizations (SMOs), and networks are not elites enjoying the status quo. When elites believe that a social movement threatens their status or their dominant capture of resources, elites can mount an attack on the social movement and its actors—​a counter to the movement (Zald and Useem 1987; Meyer and Staggenborg 1996). Countermovements are by definition reactionary, and this makes the tactic specifically fitting for reactionary ideologies, such as conservatism. Robin (2018) argues, though he is not the first, that conservatism is a deeply reactionary ideology. Robin positions conservatism as fundamentally fighting emancipatory efforts from feminist movements, peace movements, anti-​poverty movements, and environmental movements. Actual countermovements against all of these emancipatory programs are well-​documented (Lo 1982; Gross, Medvetz, and Russell 2011). Blee and Creasap (2010) define conservative movements as “movements that support patriotism,

338   Peter J. Jacques free enterprise capitalism, and/​or a traditional moral order and for which violence is not a frequent tactic or goal,” which are distinguished from right-​wing movements, which are “movements that focus directly on race/​ethnicity and/​or promote violence as a primary tactic or goal” (p. 270). Both are “rightist” movements that tend to express what they are against more than what they support. The CCCM began in 1992 (Jacques, Dunlap, and Freeman 2008), in opposition to the global environmentalism that was on display at the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED), also known as the Rio “Earth” Summit. There was a fear that global environmentalism was the new “communism” taking over after the demise of the Soviet Union the year before. Leading conservatives from the United States attended the Rio Summit on a reconnaissance mission, as revealed in an interview with conservative leader and former Governor of Washington state, Dixie Lee Ray. Ray notes that “I was sent there by the Free Congress Committee, headed by Paul Weyrich. Fred Smith and I were sent down as observers, with reporters’ credentials, so we could witness the events” (Acton Institute 1992). Weyrich was also co-​founder of the Heritage Foundation,2 the Free Congress Foundation, later renamed American Opportunity, and the American Legislative Exchange Council. Fred Smith was the founder and former president of the Competitive Enterprise Institute. All of these conservative think tanks serve/​served as SCOs in the CCCM, and these leaders of the “new” right were there in Rio scouting the future. Remember that the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change was drafted in May of 1992 and opened for signatures at Rio. To the US Conservative Movement, led by CTTs funded by conservative foundations and some industry, like energy corporations (McCright and Dunlap 2000, 2003), reducing carbon dioxide emissions from relatively cheap hydrocarbon energy sources like coal threatened free enterprise capitalism and US power. Since then, the CCCM has been well-​studied, and summaries of this work can be found in several sources (Dunlap and Brulle 2015; Brulle 2020; Almiron and Xifra 2019). Thus, the purpose of this chapter is not to provide a review of research in the area, although there are some important considerations to note. First, the CCCM has been the most effective anti-​environmental project in the United States (Jacques 2009) and probably internationally, though that would take more historical work to know. It is successful in that it probably best explains why the United States has fought climate obligations (McCright and Dunlap 2003; Hein and Jenkins 2017). It is extremely well funded. Over the course of a 7-​year period studied by Brulle (2014), $7 billion was poured into the denial machinery—​CTTs, foundations, corporate donations etc.—​and most of this was untraceable “dark” money donated anonymously. The CCCM is successful also because it has impacted media and politicians. US media, speeches in Congress, and US presidential speech have increasingly resembled the rhetoric from CCCM organizations, especially if the organizations are corporate-​funded (Farrell 2016b). Indeed, “every additional $10,000 a representative received from countermovement industries significantly decreased odds of their taking the pro-​environmental stance even when controlling for representatives’ demographics, districts, Congressional polarization and time-​period” (Ard, Garcia, and Kelly 2017, p. 1107). Second, climate denial has succeeded in politically polarizing ACC (Dunlap, McCright, and Yarosh 2016; Johnson and Schwadel 2019; Farrell 2016a). Polarized, partisan opposition to an issue that runs contrary to established science can survive because information travels in “echo chambers” where misinformation moves between allies without being confronted

Anglo Fears   339 and certainly not corrected, and this is evident in the public and the US Congress (Jasny and Fisher 2019; Johnson and Schwadel 2019). This polarization also enables CCCM actors to believe there is an active conspiracy to promote climate science as real, thus the word “hoax” is a prominent accusation within the CCCM communication (Lahsen 1999; McKewon 2012; Jacques and Knox 2016; Joseph and Santiago 2017).

The Comparative Geography of the CCCM One goal of this chapter is to expand what we know of the comparative geographic scope of the CCCM. In this case, geography provides a distinct pattern of countries that organize climate denial compared to those that do not, and, from this pattern, we can begin to build theory about climate denial and therefore significant obstacles to building workable international climate institutions. Climate denial manifests first in claims that climate science is wrong or exaggerated, which leads to attacks on climate science integrity (Boussalis and Coan 2016) and attacks against protecting environmental systems and environmentalism. Climate denial occurs around the world, but the countermovement is primarily contained and organized in Anglo countries guided by US and UK SCOs. Still, there are signs that just as the elite-​led countermovement has successfully convinced a populist right-​wing public that climate science is a global fraud, there are signs that the US-​centered CCCM is influencing the politics of denial internationally. Forchtner (2019) shows that denial and rejection of anthropogenic environmental changes (though ethnonationalism often ties the land to the homeland) are now an important element of the growing power of the European right wing, in Sweden and Norway in particular. Norgaard (2011), through intensive ethnographic study in Norway, found one part of Norwegian denial was really a defense of ontological security, afraid of losing core national elements of identity that evolved from the cold environment. This was more of a silence than an organized effort to reject science and policy. Germany has also been a location of research in climate denial. In past research, climate denial had not become a “mainstream phenomenon” (Engels et al. 2013), but later research shows that denial narratives in newspapers have increased over time (Kaiser and Rhomberg 2016). Likewise, Tynkkynen and Tynkkynen (2018) show a rise of denialist rhetoric in Russia tied to Putin’s third term, and aligned with Putin’s authoritarian state-​building. They find that climate denial rhetoric “emphasizes Russia’s Great Power status, identifying its sovereignty and fossil energy as the basis of this status focused on fuel independence” (p. 1103). Also, while there does not appear to be research showing Brazil as a place for climate denial organization, Brazilian President (as of January 2019) Jair Bolsonoro, “denies the existence of anthropogenic climate change and chose a minister of foreign affairs who considers global warming to be an ‘invention of Marxist ideology’ ” (Ferrante and Fearnside 2019, p. 262). Certainly, there is evidence of denial growing in many ways (e.g., the volume of denial content; see Boussalis and Coan 2016), but also growing to more than just Anglo countries. We now turn to work that shows the comparative difference between and within Anglo countries in the CCCM.

340   Peter J. Jacques

Anglo Dominance in the CCCM To understand the CCCM, we can turn to cross-​country surveys, but most do not specifically look for denial per se. Many surveys show that concern for ACC is negatively associated with wealth and GHGs (Sandvik 2008; Kim and Wolinsky-​Nahmias 2014). Tranter and Booth (2015) do in fact specifically look to climate skepticism and find that the highest levels of skepticism were in Australia, New Zealand, Norway, and the United States and that skepticism is positively correlated with higher levels of GHGs. Another approach is to study climate denial publications, but this has one important weakness: it has been centered on English-​language publications. This is a limitation of most of my own work in climate denial (English-​language) books. The first of these studies, Jacques, Dunlap, and Freeman (2008), cultivated a list of 141 (1972–​2005) books promoting “environmental skepticism,” which we defined as casting mainly global environmental problems, including ACC, as inauthentic—​not real or important. Climate denial was the foremost concern in these books. Of these books, 92% (130/​141) had CTT connections (e.g., were published by CTTs or authored by CTT affiliates). Only Anglo countries had more than one authored book, and almost all of the books that were not published in the United States or United Kingdom had connections to CTTs in the United States or United Kingdom (see Figure 18.1). A follow-​up study (Dunlap and Jacques 2013) strictly focused on climate denial rather than general denial of the environmental science, found that the CCCM had diffused to more countries, but not substantially. By focusing on English-​language books that denied either the warming trend, human attribution, and/​or negative impacts of ACC, published from the first book we could find in 1982 and ending at 2010, we found that books were

Figure 18.1 The geography of general denial of environmental problems in English-​ language books, 1972–​2005. Source: GeoNames, Microsoft, Navinfo, TomTom, Wikipedia.

Anglo Fears   341

Figure 18.2  The geography of climate denial in English-​language books, 1982–​2010. Source: GeoNames, Microsoft, Navinfo, TomTom, Wikipedia.

published in more countries. However, 87% of the non-​US/​UK books had connections to CTTs primarily in the United States and/​or United Kingdom. Figure 18.2 illustrates this diffusion, which emerged after 2000. If the books tell the tale, there is minor international diffusion, but this diffusion remains squarely centered in the United States, then the United Kingdom, then other Anglo countries, then some slight appearance in continental Europe. Of the 108 books, 99 (92%) are from Anglo countries. Turning to the work of Ruth McKie (2019) helps shed more comprehensive light. She identified CCCM organizations, broadly defined. Based on the CCCM literature, McKie identified organizations that had some focus on the issue of ACC that is oppositional to the consensus, and adopt one or more of the following criteria incorporated into their mission statement or purpose: principles of free market ideology; free enterprise; deregulation; property rights; economic and religious freedom; the rejection of social liberalism. (McKie 2018, p. 136)

She found 462 active CCCM organizations in 56 countries (1950–​2016).3 Of these, 315 (71%) were in the United States. Figure 18.3 indicates that where the CCCM has appeared is significantly larger than any other research has shown, but even with this amount of diffusion, it is clear that the CCCM is centered in the United States and predominately in Anglo countries, which account for almost 80% of the total organizations (364/​462, 79%). Furthermore, McKie found that many of the organizations in the Global South had connections to Anglo CTTs (e.g., the Liberty Institute in India has a connection to the Heartland Institute in the United States, and the Association for the Free Consumer in Costa Rica has a connection to the British Independence Institute). It appears that the organization of climate denial is an Anglo affair, absent in any substantial way elsewhere.

342   Peter J. Jacques 315

USA UK Canada Australia France Argentina Belgium Brazil China Germany Peru Czech Republic Guatemala Italy New Zealand Nigeria Austria Bulgaria Costa Rica Denmark India Malaysia Mexico Slovakia South Africa Spain Switzerland Albania Bahamas Belarus Burkin o Faso Chile Ecuador Georgia Ghana Hong Kong Israel Lithuania Netherlands Norway Pakistan Paraguay Philippines Paraguay Poland Romania Russia South Korea Sweden Thailand Turkey Uruguay Venezuela

17 15 12 9 5 5 5 5 5 5 4 3 3 3 3 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1

Figure 18.3  Country’s with Climate Change Countermovement organizations. Source: Data adapted from Ruth McKie, 2018, “Rebranding the Climate Change Counter Movement Through a Criminological and Political Economic Lens,” Dissertation, Northumbria University.

Note that Anglo countries are all democracies, and each has a relatively free society that allows for environmental organizations to lobby government for more sustainable practices (see, e.g., Portney and Berry 2014). Furthermore, these countries are not data poor—​the United States and the United Kingdom, especially, produce voluminous amounts of climate research and all sustain a free press. None of that makes the Anglo cluster special, though these would be questions normally included in comparative inquiry. What does separate out this group is the fact that “the Anglo countries represent . . . arguably the most powerful and economically advanced group the world has ever seen,” making the Anglo cluster a conspicuous case to compare against the rest of the world’s regions (Ashkanasy, Trevor-​ Roberts, and Earnshaw 2002, p. 29). While Anglo countries clearly organize the CCCM, there are important differences within these countries. In essence, the conventional energy industries are promoted and protected in all of these countries, but the intensity of denial across all three domains (trend, attribution, and impacts) is highest in the United States and United Kingdom but more subdued outside these two countries, where the CCCM started and the earliest books were published by entrepreneurial CTTs. Young and Coutinho (2013) note that conservative governments in Canada and Australia have actively pursued “ignorance-​building” strategies that tacitly admit climate change but the denial machinery—​industrial lobby groups, think tanks, private foundations, openly partisan media, and corporate-​backed citizen organizations” advocating denial—​“have less public legitimacy, and the general population is less polarized on climate change issues” (p. 91). Thus, in both countries, the public is less influenced by the CCCM even though it is present and active in a way that continues to enrich and empower a corporate elite tied to “carbon capital” or industries tied to hydrocarbon production, refining, transportation, etc. Carroll et al. (2018). New Zealand and South Africa are even farther removed from the CCCM. In Figure 18.3, we can see that the first four countries with the most CCCM organizations are the United States, the United Kingdom, then Canada, and Australia, with New Zealand and South Africa far below. Here we will now deal directly with the core powers and organizers of the CCCM within the Anglo group, the United States and the United Kingdom.

Anglo Fears   343

The Anglo-​A merican Empire? The Anglo cluster, especially the United States, is unique in its position of global power, enabled by broad consumption of coal and oil that drive ACC. The Anglo cluster, especially the United States, is also unique in its organization of climate denial. This section will first explore the idea of an Anglo-​American Empire and then the dependence of this power on coal and oil to highlight the Anglo interest in rejecting climate science. Here, the Anglo-​American Empire debate is employed to highlight the hierarchical international position that emerged when the British and the United States constructed and defended the current international economic and legal system, culminating in the hegemonic neo-​liberal order, with policies starting with Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher (Cockett 1995; Harvey 2005; Centeno and Cohen 2012). Advocates of a postwar, singular American Empire still focus on the way that both powers operated a liberal agenda at home even as they pried open other countries through the use of food commodities in the Third World to create dependencies on US markets (Friedmann 1982) to outright occupation (as in the 2003 invasion of Iraq). Some have argued that liberal expansion of capital and markets required the stability of empire, revealing a structural relationship between empire and “free” markets (Pieterse 2004; for a defense, see Ferguson 2012). The Anglo-​American Empire then transitioned from liberalism to a neo-​liberal expression of capitalism, one that Pieterse (2004) refers to as “neo-​liberal empire,” which is “a mélange of political-​military and economic unilateralism, an attempt to merge geopolitics with the aims and techniques of neo-​liberalism” (p. 119); for example, the “Washington Consensus” of the 1990s (Williamson 1993). In Empires without Imperialism, Morefield (2014) describes the near total economic domination of the United States in the liberal world economic system, succeeding the British Empire through illiberal actions and policy. Likewise, Bacevich (2009) describes the quality of the American Empire as one deployed through “openness” (liberalism) to the movement of trade, finance, and ideas in addition to militarization. This points to the fact that both the United States and United Kingdom are liberal democracies, which Farrell (2005) notes have national and civic identities that promote limits to power domestically but less limits to, say, the use of force abroad. If there is an Anglo Empire, it has a historical relationship with the British Empire. Polemicist Christopher Hitchens (2009) argues that the key ingredient of the close relationship between the United States and the United Kingdom has actually been empire, quoting British emissary to Eisenhower, Harold Macmillon from 1943: “These Americans represent the new Roman Empire, and we Britons, like the Greeks of old, must teach them how to make it go” (Macmillon, quoted in Hitchens 2009, p. 23). Macmillon had hoped that, as the United Kingdom was supplanted as the world power, it would be able to inform the American one. Importantly, the United States and the United Kingdom have been at the center of constructing the international political economic system out of liberal ideals. The Bretton Woods global financial institutions that built the postwar economic order were negotiated principally between the United States and the United Kingdom (see, e.g., Mikesell 1994; Steil 2013). The negotiations were dominated by Harry Dexter White for the United States and John Maynard Keynes who both submitted plans to create stable multilateral institutions;

344   Peter J. Jacques but, where they differed, “the final outcome was dominated by the White Plan, not that of Keynes” (Boughton and Moggridge 2002, p. 73) indicating a transition to American hegemony. Part of this hegemony is also evident in that the United States and the United Kingdom have been at the “forefront of developing the international legal system” even though the United States has “has repeatedly ignored its obligations” under this same system (Farrell 2005, p. 9). Thus, part of the privilege from Anglo power is immunity to international limits and rules, and individuals who associate their identity with this set of privileges form an Anglo privilege identity—​let us call this imperial privilege. Nexon and Wright (2007) argue for a category of “informal empire” that occupies “a conceptual space somewhere between ideal-​typical empires and hegemonic orders” (p. 255), a category they believe the United States fits because of international ruler–​ruled negotiations. Intermediaries and local actors may, in theory, opt to reject or renegotiate any aspect of the imperial bargain. They may decide not to because they accept the legitimacy of the bargain, out of habit, or because they fear imperial sanction. The fact that such sanctions may involve the loss of crucial military, economic, or political support rather than the use of force does not render the relationship nonimperial. (p. 266)

Whether hegemon, empire, or informal empire, we are forced to acknowledge the incredible power that the United States enjoys, and this power comes with unique privilege and dispensation in the international political and economic system that it helped form. Some of this power comes from the historic power and dispensation of the British Empire, and a share of this dispensation is enjoyed by the other Anglo countries. Gallagher and Robinson (1953), who also advance a theory of informal empire, define empire as a “process of integrating new regions into the expanding economy.” This can be indirect and beyond occupied territory, and the economic integration includes more than simple resource exploitation. The exports of capital and manufactures, the migration of citizens, the dissemination of the English language, ideas and constitutional forms, were all of them radiations of the social energies of the British peoples. (p. 5)

More recent authors have written about a more explicit and physical empire that includes numerous officially annexed and military outposts, bases, and outright colonies (Immerwahr 2019) that have slipped from view of US citizens, as well as the extension of borders operated under US mandates and military strategy far from the continental United States (Miller 2019). These social energies and ideas inform the legacy capital and privileged identity of the American project, as well as other Anglo countries that internalize laissez-​faire economics and white supremacy (see, e.g., the comparative race history of the United States and South Africa drawn by Fredrickson [1982]). This project has naturally depended on extensive energy consumption. At least since World War II, it has been clear that both the US military and industrial positions have required access to and broad consumption of oil and coal, though this dependence probably goes back a hundred years prior (Shulman 2015). Thus, US military and commercial power is an artifact of cheap hydrocarbon energy; or, at least, extensive consumption of oil and coal has been a precondition for US extension and power. Smil (2017) notes that extensive and efficient use of fuels has been a condition of all global economic leaders since the Dutch Empire.

Anglo Fears   345 Priest (2012) is more specific: The control of oil also helped elevate the United States as the supreme global power. In World War I, as Britain’s Lord Curzon declared, the Allies “floated to victory upon a wave of [mostly American] oil,” powering its ships and tanks. In World War II, America’s oil abundance proved decisive in both the European and Pacific theaters. In the postwar period, American-​ controlled oil underwrote European and Japanese reconstruction. Oil thus became a key component in the exercise of American hegemony over a relatively prosperous world order, after an era in which an unstable balance of power produced two world wars sandwiched around a global depression. (p. 236)

Hegemonic social structures created by the Anglo-​American efforts are evident in concrete social forms tied to the use and growth of GHGs. For example, a powerful car culture (Paterson 2000), British and American interventions to control resources and geopolitical position in the Middle East (Heiss 1997), and the global power of the US dollar that sets the background conditions for many GHG industries from real estate to shipping through financial flows and currency trading even during and after US financial crises (Prasad 2015) all provide tangible connections to Anglo-​American privilege tied to cheap hydrocarbons. Paterson notes that because the auto industry reproduces social structure, such as patterns of capital accumulation, it participates in and reproduces the “social inequalities endemic to modern societies” (Paterson 2000). Norgaard (2012) connects this to the CCCM: “The construction of denial and innocence work to silence the needs and voices of women and people of color in the Global South, and thus reproduce global inequality along the lines of gender, race and class” (p. 80). Thus, in that ACC threatens to upend the world, it is a world order constructed by Anglo imperial privilege. As Naomi Klein (2015) and Frank Fischer (2019) both observe, this revered hegemonic American life world is under frontal assault by people that conservatives do not trust (environmentalists, experts, government, urban elites, etc.). As such, climate science and the intersectional extension of recognition beyond the white, heteropatriarchal system threatens “life as we know it” (Norgaard 2019, p. 439). Norgaard believes this and the apathy of the left “reinforce existing social structures and solidify power relations at the top” (Norgaard 2019), effectively forming the rearguard against change. Part of Anglo-​ American advantage includes actions, indulgences, freedoms, and immunities—​a denial—​of international civic obligations, responsibilities, and limits, alongside a denial of the needs of others. Thus, from a comparative perspective, it is theoretically plausible that the CCCM is organized from Anglo centers—​and no other groups—​to protect this imperial privilege. I now turn to explicit climate denial narratives, illustrated by authors from Anglo countries or who produced their books through Anglo CCCM CTTs, to explore this theory.4

Denial and Existential Dread Here I draw out explicit anxieties expressed by climate denial book authors using selections from books described in Dunlap and Jacques (2013) from 1982 to 2010. The selections here are illustrative. In terms of methods, to find these comments, I read all 108 books, marking

346   Peter J. Jacques potential denial claims based on deductive logic: climate denial casts doubt about temperature trends, human attribution, and/​or negative impacts discussed in Rahmstorf (2005). With a group of eight undergraduate researchers we then conducted reading sessions, using “positive coding” of the plain language of the prose debating if the claim fit the categories of denial described, and also coding rejection of policies reducing GHGs. Then we digitized the pages around these claims, re-​reading these inductively to discover the rationale for denial based on the coding frame of “what” and “why” (What is the claim? Why does the author make the claim?). In the spaces around denial claims, we find a primarily (but not exclusively—​see earlier discussion) Anglo existential angst and fear of loss of privileged identity threatened by the social change required to address ACC. Box 18.1 demonstrates a fear of harm or destruction to US political and economic power. Box 18.2 shows a fear of losing possessive individualism and freedom (and green is the new red). Box 18.3 demonstrates a fear of losing Western progress, in particular affluent lifestyle.

Box 18.1 Threat to US Power • “Clinton’s proposal was too moderate for the Europeans, whose radically green environment ministers such as Merkel dominated the discussion. They wanted a 10 percent cut in emissions below 1990 levels. No doubt, their economic ministers had informed their governments that any severe reductions would impact the U.S. economy more than theirs, simply because energy is so readily and cheaply available here. Germany’s structural unemployment of more than 10 percent was finally hitting home, and Merkel’s proposal would certainly "solve" that problem by internationalizing it” (Michaels and Balling 2000, p. 203—​[Note here the admission that the US had more to lose]). • “Barack Obama’s presidency is a dream come true for those seeking to use the environment to destroy the United States” (Sussman 2010, inside front flap). “Finally, after decades of stealthy determination, the quixotic conjectures of Marx have seeped into the framework of the United States, with the most effectual being the supposed environmental crisis known as global warming or climate change” (p. ix). • “[W]‌hen demands are presented to the public to contain a greenhouse effect we have seen will not occur in the predicted manner; when demands which cut so deeply into the American way of life, into the prosperity Americans worked so hard to achieve are presented to combat in essence a figment of the imagination, then, at the very latest, the public will start asking questions” (Weber 1991). • “On a more detailed level, determined efforts are under way by environmental groups and their sympathizers in foundations and in the federal government to restrict and phase out the use of fossil fuels (and even nuclear reactors) as sources of energy. Such measures would reduce greenhouse-​gas emissions into the atmosphere but also effectively deindustrialize the United States” (Singer 2000, p. i). • “The United Nations loves it [climate mitigation] for the platform it gives them to further their One World Order agenda. The UN now even has their own scientific cabal to manufacture the evidence it needs to support their agenda. The purpose of the UN is to aid in whatever ways necessary to level the playing field for less fortunate countries and, most importantly, an opportunity to beat up on the evil, capitalist, environmentally antagonistic, energy wasteful, United States” (Opalek 2007, p. 8).

Box 18.2 Threat to Individual Freedom • “The funding of the New World Order that admittedly has now begun is based on non-​facts fraudulently presented as the world with billions of dollars at stake! Whether or not we end up as serfs to the feudal war lords who seek to control the New World Order depend on the choices that we make today—​to either stand up and claim our freedom now—​or surrender ourselves and our posterity to the New World Order—​as indenture slaves” (Robinson 2010, p. 22). • “Any other legislated measures will constitute an assault on the liberty and economic well-​ being of the American people and a disruptive exercise in futility. When the science of global warming and climate change can no longer be ignored, suppressed or censored, the promoters of the man-​made global warming hoax will no longer be able to impose an authoritarian agenda through fear and hysteria” (Johnson 2008, p. 66). • “Some environmental advocates of human-​ induced global warming are promoting Nuremberg-​type trials those who dissent. Those who have enjoyed the stifling benefits of totalitarian communist systems see the green movements in democratic countries as destroying hard-​earned freedoms” (Plimer 2009, p. 435). • “In the past 150 years (at least since Marx), the socialists have been very effectively destroying human freedom under humane and compassionate slogans, such as caring for man, ensuring social equality, and fostering social welfare. The environmentalists are doing the same under equally noble-​minded slogans, expressing concern about nature more than about people (recall their radical motto "Earth First!"). In both cases, the slogans have been (and still are) just a smokescreen. In both cases, the movements were (and are) completely about power, about the hegemony of the "chosen ones" (as they see themselves) over the rest of us, about the imposition of the only correct world view (their own), about the remodeling of the world” (Klaus 2007, p. 8). • “THE GLOBAL WARMING INDUSTRY is made up of lifestyle nags and nanny-​statists seeking further interventions against the intolerable exercise of individual liberties; joined by rent-​seeking industries petitioning the state to create markets and mandates and enhance subsidies. Their common objective is expansion of government power” (Horner 2008, p. 209, emphasis in the original).

Box 18.3 Threat to Western Progress • “According to this, the UN wants to curtail or eliminate Western consumerism, including restaurants, coffee shops, TVs, mobile phones, and cars. Imagine what they think about aircraft, private boats, personal computers, and your Sport Utility Vehicle. They also want to prevent this consumer "disease" from spreading to the developing nations. This is no less than an attack on our way of life” (Gorham 2010, pp. 186–​187 emphasis in original). • “If we in the West, urged on by such activists as George Monbiot, wish to revert to primitive conditions of living-​intermittent electrical supply, severe rationing of fuel, organic farming-​ then so be it, but to condemn others to have to live in such wretched conditions is monstrous arrogance” (Foster 2009, p. 169). • “The Western way of life, particularly as experienced by most resident of the United States, must be sacrificed, according to Dr. Ehrlich” [followed by a quote from Erlich] (Goreham 2010, p. 182).

348   Peter J. Jacques Table 18.1 List of books quoted here from Dunlap and Jacques (2013) Date of publication

Country of first author

Heaven and Earth: Global Warming, the Missing Science

2009

Australia

Klaus, Vaclav

Blue Planet in Green Shackles: What is Endangered, Climate or Freedom?

2007

Czech Republic

Weber, Gerd R.

Global Warming: The Rest of the Story

1991

Germany

Goreham, Steve

Climatism! Science, Common Sense, and The 21st Century’s Hottest Topic

2010

United States

Horner, Christopher C.

Red Hot Lies: How Global Warming Alarmists Use Threats, Fraud, and Deception to Keep You Misinformed

2008

United States

Johnson, Leo

The Layman’s Guide to Understanding the Global Warming Hoax

2008

United States

Michaels, Patrick J. and Robert C. Balling, Jr.

The Satanic Gases: Clearing the Air About Global Warming

2000

United States

Opalek, Charles

A Convenient Fabrication: The Non-​crisis of Manmade Global Warming and Why We are Powerless to Change the Climate.

2007

United States

Robinson, David E.

Climategate Debunked: Big Brother, Mainstream Media, Cover-​ups

2010

United States

Singer, S. Fred

Climate Policy-​-​From Rio to Kyoto: A Political Issue for 2000-​-​And Beyond (Essays in Public Policy, No. 102)

2000

United States

Sussman, Brian

Climategate: A Veteran Meteorologist Exposes the Globalm Warming Scam

2010

United States

Author(s)/​Editor(s)

Title

Plimer, Ian

These passages illustrate the anxiety of losing a privileged Anglo identity, especially focused on the United States. The anxiety is multidimensional in that there are many fears, but unidimensional in purpose—​to ward off threats to an Anglo lifeway (Table 18.1). These passages evoke an existential dread, and an authentic fear haunts these pages. In the words of the denial authors, they believe that climate change is a threat to US power, possessive individual freedom found in the liberal and neo-​liberal regimes of free markets, and even Western progress. Those most dedicated to the neo-​liberal program, contemporary conservatives as illustrated by Dixie Lee Ray, have mobilized a defense, and this defense includes rejecting climate science and global environmentalism—​two efforts that demonstrate the reality of climate change and the need for socioeconomic change to address it.

Conclusion In a comparative perspective, Steinberg and VanDeveer (2012) note that environmental politics are partially determined by “the comparative strength and strategies of

Anglo Fears   349 environmental movements and their relations to the state” (p. 4). Indeed, by extension, we also need to look to countermovements that oppose social movements, and, in the case of climate denial, we see that the CCCM is singularly an Anglo, and primarily a US and then UK effort. These countries organize climate denial virtually alone, and, at the same time, they have the most power to lose in a climate-​driven recasting of the world order. Denial authors confirm this logic with their own words. From this comparative geography of the CCCM, it is quite plausible that denial is organized to take up the rearguard of modernity and defend an Anglo-​American, neo-​liberal empire. Climate denial may in fact be a manifestation of existential dread and anxiety for a world whose unsustainable, and in some ways terrorizing, lifeways hang in forfeit. From an anthropological view, we add a final dimension of denial—​denial of death. Connor (2010) puts it this way, speaking to Australian climate denial: Elaborate consumerist practices in the global North and affluent classes of the South (acquiring the newest, discarding the old, improving and renewing the body as a major life project, and associated rituals and beliefs) are ultimately at odds with negative messages about the future, including the spectre of a world destroyed by global heating of humanity’s own making. (p. 252)

Climate denial then is an “immortality project” used to “deny the fragility of human life worlds and by the capitalist imperative for endless exploitation of nature” (p. 254). Again, climate denial organizations and expressions exist around the world, and it is more extensive than previously thought, as shown in the data by McKie in particular. However, McKie’s data also show that the organizations are, in the vast majority, Anglo, with a majority of these in the United States, and that those organizations outside Anglo countries often have a connection to an organization in the United States or United Kingdom. As such, the CCCM as a coherent program is organized, funded, articulated as an Anglo one. Just as when we state that climate denial is almost exclusively held and propagated by a conservative ideology, it casts an even longer shadow over the CCCM when we say it is mostly confined to one group of very privileged areas and people. In other words, as we continue to unearth patterns of the CCCM, its legitimacy—​if it had any—​dims even as publics, legislators, and leaders continue to be deeply influenced by a very successful counter-​revolutionary program. Marcuse (1972) writes that US counter-​revolutionary forces are preventative, since there is no revolution to counter, and aligned with capital and capitalist development, where “the highest stage of capitalist development corresponds, in the advanced capitalist countries, to a low of revolutionary potential” (p. 5). Furthermore, he saw a “concrete link” to anti-​environmental counter-​revolutionary forces bent on exploitation of “nature” and people: “The pollution of air and water, the noise, the encroachment of industry and commerce on open natural space have the physical weight of enslavement, imprisonment” (p. 61). The CCCM is a counter-​revolutionary program created by elites meant to first purchase the US public, but then the world, loudly countering claims that indicate we need to protect Earth systems more so than the neo-​liberal empire. It is perhaps the denial of international civic responsibilities and limits as well as a denial of the needs of others outside this privilege that most warrant the title of “climate denial.” Maybe it is evident to most of the non-​Anglo countries that the CCCM is willing to let those most vulnerable to ACC feel the impacts so long as its adherents can continue to enjoy their privilege in the international system that comes from very clear hegemony. This

350   Peter J. Jacques is akin to convincing a colonial subject that their serfdom is good because it makes the lord better off.

Notes 1. There are important exceptions here, such as Patrick Michaels and Richard Lindzen, who are real scientists; but that makes them even more valuable to the movement and thus they both have deep ties to the conservative movement (e.g., via CTTS). Thus when real scientists speak out against the basics of climate science, it confuses the public about the reality of the consensus position and the amount of research and understanding behind it. 2. The other co-​founders were Edwin Feulner and beer magnate Joseph Coors, who also started the Rocky Mountain Legal Foundation (RMLF), first led by later Secretary of Interior under Ronald Reagan, James Watt. The RMLF was the first SCO for the anti-​ environmental countermovement in the Western United States, referred to as the Wise Use Movement. For more information on the Wise Use Movement, see Brulle (2000) and Jacques (2009). 3. McKie dealt with foreign-​language obstacles by having materials translated by fluent speakers in her postgraduate department without telling them the research aims. 4. One of the theories in Dunlap and Jacques (2013) is that the elite-​led CCCM inspired authors without CTT affiliations to write denial books, making the CTT affiliation only part of the story by that point in the countermovement.

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Chapter 19

Civil Disob e di e nc e , Sab otage, and V i ol e nc e in U S Environme nta l Activ i sm Joseph M. Brown This chapter explores tactical debates in the United States environmentalist movement, focusing specifically on the logic of illegal or “radical” tactics, including civil disobedience, sabotage, and interpersonal violence. Through an analysis of radical environmental politics in the United States from 1970 through 2020, the chapter develops a broader theoretical understanding of why activists escalate from legal tactics (lobbying, litigation, marches, public awareness campaigns, etc.) to more confrontational modes of struggle. This theoretical framework provides a basis for comparative analyses of environmentalism in other countries and historical settings, identifying circumstances that may incentivize the escalation from legal forms of struggle to blockades, occupations, property destruction, and direct attacks on government and business employees. The chapter identifies two theoretical concepts as particularly significant. The first is a concept of stepwise escalation, from mainstream tactics allowed under law to nondestructive civil disobedience, to sabotage, to interpersonal violence. Activists escalate from one level to the next when government and business interests prove unresponsive to activism at the present level. Thus, we see escalation in proportion to the amount of government and business recalcitrance. The second key concept is the diversity of tactics. Even in hotly contested campaigns, activists tend not to escalate their tactics in unison. Rather, a majority continues to use legal tactics while a highly motivated minority escalates to more radical means of struggle. Even among those who escalate to radical tactics, most opt for the least confrontational option, civil disobedience. Should this nondestructive civil resistance fail, a subset of the protestors may escalate to the use of sabotage or even interpersonal violence. Although the number of activists opting for the most radical tactics will increase in proportion to the degree of government and business resistance, the number who escalate will generally be less than the number who remain at the lower level. Instead of a ladder of escalation, this chapter envisions a pyramid, with most activists remaining at the lowest

Civil Disobedience, Sabotage, and Violence    357

Violence

Sabotage

Civil Disobedience

Legal Tactics

Figure 19.1  Pyramid of environmentalist tactics. (least confrontational) level, a few climbing to the next level, and perhaps a few climbing to the next level after that until business and government accede to the activists’ demands (Figure 19.1). Radical tactics sometimes provoke controversy within the environmentalist movement, with activists debating the morality and efficacy of illegal and destructive modes of struggle. However, the diversity of tactics is also a source of strength. Lobbying, litigation, and public education take time to produce results. Environmentalists often lack the luxury of time as businesses destroy irreplaceable ecosystems, eradicate species, and push the global climate toward a point of no return. However, civil disobedience and sabotage by small groups of committed resisters may delay environmentally destructive projects, buying time for court filings and legislative initiatives to wind their way through the legal system and deliver the eventual “coup de grace.” In other cases, a combined activist push on multiple fronts—​litigation, civil disobedience, and sabotage—​may impose cumulative delays and economic costs until a polluting business simply abandons its destructive project. Activists understand the power of tactical diversity. The same organization (e.g., Greenpeace) may employ a combination of legal and illegal tactics. It is also quite common to see multiple organizations and social movements involved in the same environmental campaign, each contributing according to its tactical comparative advantage. I develop these theoretical insights inductively in the sections that follow, based on historical examples from US environmental campaigns. After defining key terms and the scope of my analysis, I address each escalatory level of tactics in turn: civil disobedience, sabotage, and violence. My focus in this chapter is on tactical radicalism and the factors that incentivize or disincentivize it. I therefore pay particular attention to debates within the environmental movement concerning the political efficacy and morality of each tactic. I also offer some examples from other countries’ environmental politics, showing how my theoretical framework might be extended to the analysis of activists’ tactical choices outside of the United States. The concluding section focuses on this comparative dimension, suggesting directions for further research.

358   Joseph M. Brown

Scope and Key Terms I define “environmentalism” as a movement seeking to protect the natural environment—​for example, species, ecosystems, the climate—​from the destructive effects of human activity. The movement consists of a loose coalition of conservationists, sustainability advocates, Indigenous people’s groups, “green anarchists,” left-​leaning religious activists, and animal rights supporters. Although there is overlap between the two movements, I distinguish environmentalism that seeks to preserve wild species from animal rights activism that concerns itself with the well-​being of animals in labs, slaughterhouses, and other human-​ built environments. Environmentalists employ a variety of tactics to defend the natural world from the excesses of human action. These tactics may include legal activities like lobbying and litigation, civil disobedience, physical sabotage, and even acts of interpersonal violence. For the purpose of this chapter, I define violence as inflicting physical harm on another person without their consent. This definition differs from alternatives that consider the destruction of property to be violent. Without wading into a philosophical debate about the relative moral evils of property damage and bodily harm, I adopt a narrow definition of violence that is most useful for my analytical purposes. The word “sabotage” clearly connotes the destruction or disabling of property without connoting harm to people. By defining violence as harm to people, not property, I ensure that the key terms—​violence and sabotage—​are conceptually distinct. I can thus explore the environmental movement’s internal debates about the strengths and weaknesses of sabotage and violence with a minimum of confusion over terminology (Davis 1995; Pellow 2014; Scarce 2006.

Civil Disobedience Civil disobedience is the first escalatory tactic of radical environmentalism. It encompasses a variety of essentially passive techniques of resistance, such as blocking roads, locking oneself to industrial equipment, and occupying trees to prevent logging and pipeline construction through wooded areas. In the 1980s and 1990s, for instance, environmentalist “tree-​sitters” occupied ancient redwoods and Douglas fir trees in California and the Pacific Northwest, deterring loggers from cutting the trees (Freeman 1995; Speece 2017). These tactics are obstructive, halting extractive activity and imposing economic costs on businesses and governments, but they cause no harm to people or property. Civil disobedience tactics are nonetheless a departure from the legalistic approach of “establishment” environmental groups such as the Sierra Club and the Wilderness Society. These groups trace their roots to the late nineteenth-​and early twentieth-​century conservationist movement, which sought to protect wild spaces and wildlife from destruction by private industries such as logging and mining, and from government initiatives, such as hydroelectric power generation (Scarce 2006, pp. 15–​16). The establishment groups’ primary means of conserving these spaces was through lobbying: promoting the establishment of state and national parks, opposing dam construction, arguing against proposals to sell off or lease public land for extractive activities such as logging and oil exploration. Establishment environmentalist groups also pursue

Civil Disobedience, Sabotage, and Violence    359 litigation against private companies whose activities violate existing environmental laws (Scarce 2006, pp. 15–​17). There are useful critiques of this approach to environmental advocacy. A strategy of lobbying necessitates political relationship-​ building and compromise. In a capitalist country where “development” is the default policy, establishment environmentalist groups are forever operating in a domain of losses: at best, they can drive a bargain over how much pollution is acceptable, which species and wilderness areas will be sacrificed to industry and consumerism, and which will be preserved—​or mostly preserved, since even federally protected areas may later be sold or licensed for destructive activities such as logging and mining. Compounding these underlying structural problems, establishment groups often find themselves “working with” politicians who are essentially agents of industry and are actively hostile toward environmentalists’ goals (Foreman 1991, p. 17). Environmentalists disillusioned with the establishment approach have adopted civil disobedience as a tactic. By interjecting themselves physically between the machines of “progress” and the living world, radical environmentalists hope to make an immediate difference in the future of the planet (Woodhouse 2020, pp. 95–​96). They can worry less about political access and whether their demands appear moderate and reasonable to government officials. US environmentalists have practiced civil disobedience since the early 1970s, when an ad hoc coalition of ecologically minded anti-​nuclear activists sought to halt a nuclear weapons test in the Aleutian Islands by sailing their boat, the Greenpeace, into the test zone. The coalition subsequently evolved into an organization, Greenpeace, which expanded its operations to challenge nuclear testing, commercial whaling, fossil fuel extraction, and other environmentally destructive practices worldwide (Scarce 2006, pp. 47–​51). Greenpeace activists use their bodies as shields, placing themselves and their vessels in nuclear test zones and between whaling ships and their living quarries. They lock themselves onto railroad tracks to block chemical trains and they suspend themselves beneath bridges so that oil exploration vessels cannot pass beneath without injuring or killing the activists (Matthews 2018). Greenpeace is not the only environmental group to play “chicken” with polluters. Activists from groups such as Earth First! have employed tree-​sits and road blockades to thwart logging operations on state and federal lands (Freeman 1995; Speece 2017). These campaigns have spanned decades, from the 1980s into the 2020s (Woodhouse 2020). Indigenous-​led campaigns employ civil disobedience as well. In 2016 and 2017, members of the Standing Rock Sioux nation erected protest camps, locked their bodies to bulldozers, and occupied access roads to stop the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) across their ancestral lands (Estes 2019; Gilio-​Whitaker 2019). Although this campaign’s historical roots lie in Indigenous peoples’ struggles to protect their land rights, the anti-​DAPL protests also have a clear environmental dimension, with Standing Rock activists highlighting the oil pipeline’s threat to their drinking water and groups like Earthjustice filing lawsuits to challenge pipeline companies’ environmental permits (Frazin 2020). A similar comparative case has developed north of the border, in Canada, where members of the Wet’suwet’en nation have obstructed the Coastal Gaslink pipeline transiting their lands and solidarity blockades by other Indigenous groups ground Canadian rail traffic to a halt for several weeks in 2020 (Canadian Press 2020). We see the stepwise escalation of tactics play out quite clearly in the southeastern United States, where ad hoc organizations like Appalachians Against Pipelines lock their bodies to excavators, scale construction cranes, and climb trees to prevent fossil fuel companies

360   Joseph M. Brown from clearing land for oil and gas infrastructure. Becky Crabtree, a West Virginia grandmother and schoolteacher whose land was seized by the Mountain Valley Pipeline corporation under “eminent domain,” suspended herself and her 1971 Ford Pinto inside the pipeline easement. Perched on a narrow pile of landscaping ties and chained to the company’s excavators, the teetering car and its occupant blocked construction temporarily. Crabtree described her decision to engage in direct action and face felony charges. I have talked to the elected officials, signed petitions, written letters, submitted reports, and gone to court. I have exhausted the “usual” methods of fighting injustice and gotten no relief. . . . Officials have failed us in this fight; we need to fight for ourselves and each other. (Appalachians Against Pipelines 2019)

Activists undertake these tactics anticipating a high probability of arrest. They may face a variety of charges, ranging from misdemeanors to felonies, in some cases including terrorism. In June 2019, two Mountain Valley Pipeline protestors were charge with “felony threats of terrorist acts.” It is not clear who or what these activists allegedly threatened: one had chained himself to construction equipment and the other had blockaded himself inside a section of gas pipeline that had not yet been installed (Ridder 2019). The legal threat to these activists is very real, however, with multiyear prison sentences possible. In addition, activists face the potential for violent reprisals by business employees and the state. In 1990, redwoods activists Judi Bari and Daryl Cherney suffered near-​fatal injuries when a nail bomb, placed by unknown assailants, exploded beneath the driver’s seat of their car (Liddick 2006, p. 61). In 1998, loggers working for the Pacific Lumber Company killed Earth First! activist David Chain by felling a tree on top of him (Liddick 2006, p. 101). Elsewhere in the Americas, Secwepemc activists resisting Canada’s Trans Mountain pipeline have suffered nighttime raids, assaults, and death threats, and Indigenous Honduran activist Berta Cáceres was shot dead after repeated threats and confrontations with government and private security forces advancing an unpopular dam project across Lenca land (Blitzer 2016; Johnson 2020). The courage of civil resisters notwithstanding, mainstream environmental groups can question whether radical tactics are effective at influencing policy. Greenpeace’s first campaign against nuclear testing failed to stop the US government from detonating a bomb, and its 1972 campaign against French nuclear testing succeeded only in earning the Greenpeace activists a severe beating at the hands of French military commandos (Scarce 2006, p. 47). Tree-​sitters can be forced down and activists can be extracted from their suspension bridge blockades, allowing oil exploration ships to pass freely (Fountain 2006; Matthews 2018). Moreover, the zeal with which some organizations (the United Kingdom-​based Extinction Rebellion, for instance) seek arrest leads skeptics to ask whether they are “glorifying arrests and incarceration” rather than “seeking to change society as we know it” (Smoke 2019). Yet there is also reason for optimism about the potential of civil disobedience tactics. Research by political scientists Erica Chenoweth and Maria J. Stephan (2011) shows that nonviolent civil resistance campaigns do achieve their goals in many cases. Civil disobedience helped to preserve redwoods in California, halt commercial whaling, and cancel the Atlantic Coast Pipeline, a major natural gas infrastructure project (Malik 2020; Scarce 2006). Yet it is also important to note that environmentalists did not win the aforementioned victories through civil disobedience alone. The redwoods campaigners used a diverse tactical mix of civil disobedience, litigation, and lobbying to slow and eventually halt

Civil Disobedience, Sabotage, and Violence    361 the logging of key areas, a struggle that dragged on from 1983 to 1990 (Speece 2017). The campaign against the Atlantic Coast Pipeline likewise involved tree-​sitters, street protestors, lawyers, lobbyists, and concerned citizens who flooded meeting rooms where Virginia state air and water pollution control boards met to consider permits for the pipeline project. The campaigners represented not only environmentalism, narrowly defined, but also property owners, community organizations, and racial justice organizers since the pipeline route disproportionately affected Black communities. Their combined efforts put the pipeline hopelessly behind schedule and $3.5 billion over its original budget, causing energy companies to back out of the project (Vogelsong 2020). The Dakota Access Pipeline is likewise at risk of suffering death by a thousand activists’ cuts. Just a day after the Atlantic Coast Pipeline’s cancellation, a US District Court ordered the shutdown of the DAPL (which had already begun pumping oil) pending a new environmental review that could last up to 13 months (Carpenter 2020). A higher court allowed the pipeline to resume operation, but the court-​ mandated environmental review must continue. Earthjustice lawyers working on behalf of the Standing Rock Sioux note that the DAPL is now “operating illegally” on a vacated permit (Frazin 2020). Any further stoppages or lawsuits against the pipeline owner, Energy Transfer Partners, will compound the estimated $7.5 billion in losses associated with the initial #NoDAPL protests (Fredericks et al. 2018, p. 47). These are serious challenges to any company’s profitability and its ability to secure credit from investors. Individual environmentalist groups have grasped the potential of mixing radical and legal tactics. Greenpeace, for instance, has evolved into a multinational organization (incorporated in the Netherlands) with chapters in 27 countries, more than $100 million in yearly spending, and roughly $68 million in reserve equity (Greenpeace International 2020). Although the group still engages in direct action, it also participates in research and lobbying activities. The Sierra Club, which historically focused on lobbying, has grown more accepting of civil disobedience tactics over time. The group’s website recently published an approving story about “Nonviolent Direct Action and the Necessity Defense” employed by Pacific Northwest coal train blockaders while including a legal disclaimer that the “Sierra Club has a policy to not officially support acts of civil disobedience” (Minchew n.d.). Other lobbying-​focused organizations employ some amount of civil disobedience from their inception. The Sunrise Movement, a progressive youth organization and Political Action Committee, lobbies Congressional Democrats to pass a climate-​friendly “Green New Deal.” However, the organization also staged an illegal sit-​in in House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office when the California Democrat appeared to lose her focus on the climate issue (Leber 2019). It is also quite common to see multiple organizations and social movements involved in the same environmental campaign, each contributing according to its tactical comparative advantage. The campaigns against the ACP and DAPL are good examples, with environmentalists, anarchists, Indigenous activists, racial justice groups, and local community members contributing their bodies and voices through civil disobedience and the well-​funded establishment groups making legal filings and arguing court cases against the pipeline companies. Along the US–​Mexico border, lawyers from the Center for Biological Diversity make common cause with Indigenous rights protestors blockading the construction of US President Donald Trump’s border wall, which bisects O’odham lands and habitats that sustain vulnerable species such as the Sonoyta mud turtle (Devereaux 2019). In Canada, the Unist’ot’en clan of the Wet’suwet’en has drawn a diverse group of Indigenous and settler allies into its anti-​pipeline campaign, including anarchists, Greenpeace activists, and the

362   Joseph M. Brown Sierra Club (CrimethInc 2013). The protest camps along the Mountain Valley Pipeline are likewise diverse. A variety of banners festoons the Yellow Finch protest camp’s various tree-​ sits, tripods, and monopods (which attach an activist’s living platform to multiple trees, blocking a wider area). The anti-​MVP signage of Appalachians Against Pipelines mixes with that of Indigenous people’s groups, trans anarchists, feminist people of color’s groups, and the simple “RESIST” sign of 75-​year-​old “raging granny” and midwife, Duff Benjamin, who traveled from Durham, North Carolina, to participate in the blockade (Appalachians Against Pipelines 2019). The direct action tree-​sit campaign against the MVP has been ongoing since February 2018, helping to put the MVP $1.7 billion over budget and at least 2 years behind schedule—​with the possibility of additional delays as previously granted permits approach their expiration dates and lawyers from groups like the Sierra Club challenge their renewal (Dashiell 2020; Hammack 2019). This analysis suggests that tactical diversity is a source of strength for the environmentalist movement. Civil disobedience can be effective when backed up by legal tactics that deliver victory in the form of a court ruling or legislative rule change. Yet these legal tactics take time to work. It may fall to a small contingent of committed civil disobedience activists to grind an environmentally destructive project to a halt and hold the space while legal actions wind their way through the courts. The successes of key environmentalist campaigns cannot be traced to a single tactic or organization, but to a synergistic combination of legal action and radical civil disobedience by diverse coalitions of activists and groups.

Sabotage Several of the above-​mentioned campaigns also involved the use of sabotage. Although it would be too simplistic to associate any environmental organization with a single tactical approach, Earth First! deserves much of the credit for popularizing the use of sabotage in US environmental activism (Pike 2017; Scarce 2006). More of a social movement than a group, Earth First! conducts outward-​facing advocacy, publicity stunts, blockades, and educational efforts to train environmental activists in the practice of “ecotage.” The founding group of Earth First!ers was a closely knit collective of former establishment environmentalists who split away from groups like the Wilderness Society to adopt a more radical “no compromise” strategy. They took on large issues—​hydroelectric power, deforestation, and endangered species conservation—​and they appreciated the importance of spectacle. The group’s inaugural action was to unfurl a long, black plastic banner from the top of the Glen Canyon Dam, symbolically “cracking” it to show environmentalists’ fury at the project and the acquiescence of the establishment Sierra Club in its construction (Manes 1990, pp. 4–​6). Many Earth First! actions resemble the civil disobedience tactics of Greenpeace: activists sitting down to block logging roads, chaining themselves to bulldozers, and running serious personal risks by placing their bodies between destructive industry and nature (Davis 1995, pp. 17–​19). Earth First!ers are responsible for a large proportion of the tree-​sits in the United States, either by direct participation (as in the Northern California redwoods campaigns of the 1980s and 1990s) or by providing how-​to guides and “direct action trainings” for activists (Earth First! DAM Collective 2015; Speece 2017). Where Earth First! differs from Greenpeace, however, is in its attitude toward the destruction of property.

Civil Disobedience, Sabotage, and Violence    363 Researcher Rik Scarce (2006, p. 54) observes that Greenpeace and other less radical environmentalist groups view nonviolence as “strategy, the overall and final approach to issues”; Earth First! views nonviolence as one potentially useful tactic to be employed, depending on what the strategic circumstances require. Civil disobedience tactics such as sit-​down road blockades, tree-​sits, and maritime confrontations are effective in many cases, but there are other situations where passive resistance may not be enough. If the object of protection is very remote or very large, such as a national forest or a mountaintop scheduled for mining, it may be difficult to muster the numbers required for an effective blockade. Civil disobedience also requires a certain type of activist, one willing to submit to arrest and possible physical attack by business employees and police. If they cannot muster enough activists to run these risks, environmentalists may require a different tactical tool that relies on stealth and allows them to evade capture. Activists may also wish to target the offending corporation’s physical assets, “monkeywrenching” its destructive machinery and eating into its profit margins. The strategy and many of the specific tactics are foreshadowed in a 1975 novel, The Monkey Wrench Gang, authored by Edward Abbey, a personal associate of Earth First!’s early leaders (Abbey 1975). Earth First! cofounder David Foreman (1991, pp. 118–​119) explains how the group turned Abbey’s vision into action. Monkeywrenching includes such acts as pulling up survey stakes, putting sand in the crankcases of bulldozers, rendering dirt roads in wild areas impassable to vehicles, cutting down billboards, and removing and destroying trap lines. . . . The goals of monkeywrenching are to block environmentally destructive projects, to increase the costs of such projects and thereby make them economically unattractive, and to raise public awareness of the taxpayer-​ subsidized devastation of biological diversity occurring throughout the world.

The Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, a more radical offshoot of Greenpeace, developed a maritime corollary to Earth First!’s “ecotage” tactics. By ramming or clandestinely scuttling illegal whaling and fishing vessels, Sea Shepherd disarms those who would otherwise threaten endangered species (Scarce 2006, pp. 97–​113). Sabotage also has a deterrent quality. David Foreman explains: “If a forest supervisor knows that a road will be continually destroyed, he won’t try to build it. . . . If ORVers [Off Road Vehicle enthusiasts] know that they’ll get flat tires miles from nowhere, they won’t drive in such areas” (Foreman 1991, p. 116). Nowhere is the deterrent logic clearer than in the practice of tree-​spiking: driving metal or ceramic nails into living trees to prevent logging companies and US government agencies from felling them. Another early Earth First!er, Christopher Manes (1990, p. 11) explains: “Harmless to trees, the spikes can damage chain saws and expensive band saws in the mill. . . . [I]‌f the cost of removing the spikes is high enough, the cut will not be made, or at the very least a decreased profit margin will discourage logging in areas controversial enough to inspire this type of ecological resistance.” Earth First!ers helped to popularize such tactics by publishing do-​it-​yourself manuals—​ Foreman’s 1985 Ecodefense: A Field Guide to Monkeywrenching, Earth First!’s illustrated Direct Action Manual, and a quarterly magazine, the Earth First! Journal, which carries news of direct action campaigns worldwide. Ecotage polarized the radical wing of the environmentalist movement, with monkeywrenchers on one side of the debate and groups like Greenpeace on the other. Although there are many potential critiques of sabotage, three are particularly common: first, that property destruction is violence and therefore immoral; second, that

364   Joseph M. Brown property destruction provokes a punitive government response; and third, that property destruction is alienating to those who might otherwise support the environmentalist cause. A Greenpeace executive interviewed by Rik Scarce (2006, p. 54) articulates the first two critiques. [W]‌hat is happening to the environment is violent, so we are not going to take violent action ourselves to fight that. That’s what the fundamental principle is. It’s also a recognition that if you do take violent action against property, you’re sort of drawing upon yourself a like response.

I have differentiated sabotage from violence for conceptual clarity, but this does not address the normative question of whether damaging an inanimate object is morally equivalent to harming a human being. Former Earth First! Journal co-​editor Christopher Manes observes that “Whether ecotage is ‘violent’ in itself is an ethical question best left to an individual’s own conscience” (Manes 1995, pp. 261–​262). The second critique, that sabotage draws “upon yourself a like response,” can be debated on logical grounds, given the severe violence that nondestructive activists routinely suffer at the hands of industry and the state. In 1985, French military commandos used explosives to sink the Greenpeace vessel Rainbow Warrior at anchor in Auckland, New Zealand, killing a photojournalist who was trapped inside (Liddick 2006, p. 16). When the Standing Rock Sioux confronted the DAPL nonviolently, private security contractors attacked them with dogs, water cannons, and mace (Hawkins 2016; Levin 2016). At the same anti-​DAPL protest, police nearly killed activist Sophia Wilansky with a concussion grenade. Wilansky’s father describes how the grenade landed on her arm and “blew the bone out,” requiring multiple surgeries to save the limb (Polhamus 2016). Even if we take at face value the argument that property destruction draws “a like response,” it is clear that civil disobedience draws exactly the same response in many cases, except that the destruction is entirely one way. The third critique, that sabotage alienates potential supporters, falls squarely within the realm of empirical political science. Environmental movement scholar Bron Taylor (2013) argues that “the more an action risks or intends to hurt people, the more the media and public focus on the tactics rather than the concerns that gave rise to the actions. This means that the most radical tactics tend to be counterproductive to the goal of increasing awareness and concern in the general public.” As plausible as this argument sounds, there is reason to doubt its empirical truth. In their analysis of US electoral politics, Ben Farrer and Graig R. Klein (2019) find that acts of environmentally motivated sabotage have “a negative impact on voter attitudes toward all environmental organizations,” but this effect is negated if voters perceive that “democratic methods had failed” to achieve necessary reforms. Since sabotage tends to be an escalatory tactic rather than a tactic of first resort, its negative effect on environmentalists’ public image is likely to be mitigated in many cases by a history of failed legal activism that demonstrated the need for more radical steps. Although Earth First! has persisted in its enthusiasm for ecotage, it has adjusted its tactics in one important way: by renouncing the tactic of tree-​spiking. Activists reevaluated the tactic after a 1987 incident in which sawmill worker George Alexander cut into a hidden spike and suffered near-​fatal injuries to his face and neck. Logging interests were quick to blame Earth First!, although it appears that the tree was spiked by a local landowner displeased with the logging taking place near his property (Bari 1993a). Earth First!ers were quick to point out that their activists issue deterrent warnings (a tactic common among casualty-​averse militant groups) to prevent harm to loggers, but the perpetrator of this particular action had neglected to tell anyone about the spikes in the trees (Brown 2020a; Manes 1990, p. 11). Even

Civil Disobedience, Sabotage, and Violence    365 if Earth First! was not responsible, the incident sparked a debate within the movement. Judi Bari, who spearheaded the campaign to save the California redwoods and was nearly blown up for her trouble, questioned the nonviolence of tree-​spiking, its deterrent effect, and its political utility since it spoiled opportunities for solidarity with logging company employees, some of whom were actually instrumental in saving redwoods (Bari 1993a, 1993b; Speece 2017). Bari’s logic prevailed and Earth First! ceased its embrace of the tactic. Not all environmentalists renounced tree spiking, however, and some were willing to escalate even further. In the 1980s and 1990s, Earth First! Journal editor Rod Coronado perpetrated a string of radical actions, sabotaging hunts, “liberating” fur farms, setting fire to animal testing laboratories, and scuttling a pair of Icelandic whaling ships on behalf of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society (Kuipers 2009). These actions, publicized in the Journal’s pages, introduced US environmentalists to increasingly destructive forms of sabotage. Roughly at the same time, activists in the United Kingdom and the United States established the Earth Liberation Front (ELF), a self-​described “international underground organization that uses direct action in the form of economic sabotage to stop the exploitation and destruction of the natural environment” (North American Earth Liberation Front Press Office 2001, p.1). In contrast with Earth First!’s highly visible presence in the radical environmental movement (its banner drops, publications, etc.), the ELF operates almost entirely in the shadows. The group’s decentralized network of underground cells functions anarchically, with no leadership structure and no organizational ties among the cells, except for an aboveground press office that operated from 1997 through 2002 (Brown 2020b). The ELF’s strategic logic is not to blockade businesses to slow their predatory activities, but to punish them via property destruction and economic attrition. This emphasis on inflicting economic damage leads the ELF to embrace both tree-​spiking and arson (Pickering 2007). However, the ELF professes to be a nonviolent organization. Its widely publicized guidelines instruct cells “to take all necessary precautions against harming life,” and, thus far, the ELF has yet to injure any of its targets personally (Brown 2020b, p. 246). ELF cells have, however, inflicted tens of millions of dollars of financial damage, setting fire to logging companies’ corporate offices, under-​construction ski lodges, suburban development projects, animal research labs, and a US Forest Service research station (Pickering 2007). The escalating damage toll led the US government to launch a massive “ecoterrorism” investigation of the ELF, resulting in a string of arrests and long federal prison sentences for the group’s most prolific cells (Deshpande and Ernst 2012). With its veteran activists incarcerated and prospective activists intimidated by the prospect of prison, the US branch of the ELF has been quiescent since 2010. Yet it appears that ELF-​like tactics have caught on with other activists. In 2016 and 2017, when it seemed that pipeline contractors and US authorities had triumphed over protestors and cleared the way for the DAPL, Ruby Montoya and Jessica Reznicek, two activists from the Catholic Workers movement, went on a clandestine sabotage spree that could easily have passed for an ELF campaign. The women cut pipeline valves with acetylene torches and set fire to several pieces of heavy construction equipment. However, unlike the ELF, they admitted their crimes and accepted arrest at a public press conference. A string of other arsons of construction equipment along the DAPL route, totaling roughly $3 million in damage, remains unsolved, suggesting that other as-​yet anonymous activists have embraced arson as a sabotage tactic (Petroski 2017). These events demonstrate that the diversity of tactics sometimes extends to sabotage. A single campaign like that against the DAPL may involve legal action and public advocacy,

366   Joseph M. Brown civil disobedience, and acts of sabotage by a subset of activists who have reached a point of extreme frustration with the legal and “civil” approaches. Environmentalists have not formed a consensus on the morality or efficacy of sabotage, but this does not stop groups that eschew sabotage (or certain sabotage tactics) from offering tacit approval of other groups’ actions. The Earth First! Journal recently republished a piece of do-​it-​yourself ELF literature from the group’s heyday, Setting Fires with Electrical Timers. Although Earth First! has never promoted arson in its own manuals, the Journal’s editors have at least raised the specter of escalation with their positive nod to the ELF’s use of fire (Earth First! Journal Collective 2020). At other times, we see small groups of activists escalate to sabotage in solidarity with a broader campaign, most of which remains at the legal and civil disobedience levels of intensity. A recent transnational example occurred in January 2020, when anarchists sabotaged switching equipment on the Burlington Northern Santa Fe (BNSF) Railway, causing delays and backups to the network, which carries large volumes of freight from the United States to Canada. Although the anarchists professed no Indigenous affiliation, they claimed their action in solidarity with Indigenous people carrying out civil disobedience blockades of rail traffic on the Canadian side of the border. The anarchists saluted the “Wet’suwet’en hereditary leadership [which] has taken a strong stand to prevent further destruction of the land, water, and people” as well as “the matriarchs, two-​spirit people, and all Indigenous land defenders who show us that when we rise up together, another world is possible” (Anonymous 2020).

Violence Violence is the highest level of tactical escalation for social movements. US environmentalists have never embraced violence (defined here as inflicting physical harm, without consent, on another person). Yet there are periodic debates about the ethics and utility of violence in the most radical circles of the movement (Boyle 2015; Pellow 2014; Rosebraugh 2004). The statements of environmental activists suggest two possible paths through which some segment of the environmental movement might escalate to violence. The first pathway is one of frustration and perceived necessity: if environmentalists’ legal activism, civil disobedience, and sabotage fail to achieve their goals, some activists may view violence as a logical next step, a tactic of last resort when less radical options have proved ineffective. The second pathway to violence is through the escalation of environmentalists’ aims: if activists set their sights beyond environmental protection to political revolution, some are likely to escalate their tactics to challenge the state’s monopoly on the use of force. I elaborate on these two pathways in the following sections, relating them to illustrative examples from the United States and other countries.

The Pathway of Necessity The first pathway to violence is relatively straightforward. Craig Rosebraugh, a press officer for the Earth Liberation Front from 1997 to 2001, explains: “[I]‌f tactics A, B, and C do not work on their own you either give up and submit or take things to the next level. For

Civil Disobedience, Sabotage, and Violence    367 many who have first attempted more nonviolent and state-​sanctioned pursuits, they feel there is no recourse left but to step up the pressure” (Rosebraugh 2004, p. 247). Another ELF press officer, Leslie James Pickering, offered a similar analysis in a 2017 debate with author Rik Scarce: “In every political struggle, there are two sides: the oppressor and the oppressed. And it is always, a hundred percent of the time, the oppressor who decides how hard the oppressed have to fight in order to gain their liberation” (Scarce 2017). It is interesting to note this change in tone by the two ELF press officers, who spent several years publicizing the group’s sabotage actions, defending their nonviolence in the face of “ecoterrorism” accusations, and threatening to disown any ELF cell that deviated from the group’s norm of noninjurious action (Brown 2020b). Yet both press officers walked away from the ELF disillusioned, convinced that corporations and the government would not reform themselves if confronted with sabotage and civil disobedience alone. Pickering describes environmentalists, in the current circumstances, facing an open question of whether they must escalate to violence to overcome “the oppressor.” If we wanted to kill people, you would have seen the first environmentalists out killing people. But you don’t see that, right? Because that’s not what we want. Because it’s actually the opposite of what we stand for. But they’re pushing us harder and harder to fight harder and harder. And it’s really on the oppressor. “What do we have to do?” is my question. What is necessary? We’re trying to figure that out. (Scarce 2017)

Pickering’s remarks allude to an important obstacle on the path to escalation. For activists who view themselves as protectors of the trees, animals, and Mother Earth, the thought of killing humans evokes cognitive dissonance. Another obstacle to violence is strategic: many environmentalists believe that nonviolent resistance can achieve the necessary changes and that violence is self-​defeating, discrediting activists and their cause. Responding to Pickering’s remarks on violence, Rik Scarce argues, Do we fight violence with violence? How many people are you going to win over if you do that? Who’s going to look good? Who’s going to look right? We’ve got agency here. The oppressor doesn’t entirely call the shots. (Scarce 2017)

Whether for moral reasons or instrumental political reasons, most environmentalists eschew violent tactics. There are a few marginal examples of activists advocating violence. One such case is a 1991 text written under the pseudonym, “Screaming Wolf.” A Declaration of War: Killing People to Save Animals and the Environment advocates exactly what its title suggests (Screaming Wolf 1991). Another example comes from an ELF cell whose rhetoric deviated from the group’s noninjurious ethos. In claiming an August 2002 arson at a US Forest Service research station, the cell warned that “segments of this global revolutionary movement are no longer limiting their revolutionary potential by adhering to a flawed, inconsistent ‘non-​violent’ ideology. While innocent life will never be harmed in any action we undertake, where it is necessary, we will no longer hesitate to pick up the gun to implement justice” (Pickering 2007, p, 38). ELF activists have not followed through on this threat, however, and their actions have all adhered to the noninjury norm. Nonetheless, there are rare cases in which environmentalists’ violent ideation has escalated to action. One example is the self-​styled Environmental Life Force’s brief and nonlethal 1977 bombing

368   Joseph M. Brown campaign against agricultural pesticide use in the United States (Cole 1977). Two comparative examples come from Europe. In January 1982, the somewhat inappropriately named “Pacifist and Ecologist Committee” launched several Soviet-​made anti-​tank rockets at an under-​construction nuclear power plant near Lyon, killing no one (Prial 1982). As in the US context, an overwhelming majority of French environmentalists rushed to denounce the violence, later revealed as the work of an Israeli-​born Swiss activist and future Green Party MP who obtained the rockets through a bizarre supply chain that included Belgian militants of the Communist Combatant Cells and the infamous international terrorist, Carlos “the Jackal” (Besson 2003). A deadlier episode occurred in Spain in the late 1970s and early 1980s, as the Basque anti-​nuclear movement struggled, without success, to halt the construction of a nuclear power plant on the north coast of the Basque Country. The Basque separatist group Euskadi Ta Askatasuna/​Basque Homeland and Liberty (ETA), which did not share the environmental mainstream’s nonviolent tendencies, first bombed the under-​construction nuclear facilities, then kidnapped and murdered the project’s chief engineer (Barcena et al. 2000; Bew et al. 2009). ETA’s violent escalation accomplished what years of peaceful anti-​nuclear resistance had not: the Spanish government abandoned the project, leaving an otherwise completed nuclear power facility derelict without its reactor components installed. Although ETA had delivered a striking victory, the bulk of the Basque environmental movement denounced the group’s violent actions, which violated the norms of an overwhelmingly pacifist movement (Bew et al. 2009). The involvement of revolutionary terrorist organizations in the French and Basque anti-​ nuclear movements is something of a curiosity: the Communist Combatant Cells, Carlos the Jackal, and ETA are not environmentalist organizations, and their engagement with environmentalism is opportunistic—​as purveyors of weapons, in the French case, and as self-​styled allies (or unwelcome co-​opters) of environmental struggle in the Basque case. However unusual, these incidents do hint at a second pathway by which members of the environmental movement might escalate from civil disobedience and sabotage to interpersonal violence: when environmentalists cease to think of themselves as single-​issue activists and come to see themselves as part of a broader revolutionary movement, they may view violence as necessary to overthrow the political system.

The Pathway of Revolution The second pathway to violence is through an escalation of political aims, from environmentalism to revolution. Such transformations do occur, and in fact are foreshadowed in public statements by radical environmentalist groups. The Earth Liberation Front’s “pick up the gun” communiqué announces (albeit without any follow-​through) that the ELF has grown from an environmentalist group into a “global revolutionary movement” (Pickering 2007, p. 38). The communiqué typifies the thinking of US environmentalists who come to view the entire political system as the enemy—​because of the underlying capitalist notion of property rights, the Western cultural tradition of “man” dominating nature, and a nominally democratic government that claims to represent the public but often seems to leave environmentalists without a voice. If reformist environmentalism cannot succeed because the system is rotten, then radical environmentalists logically may turn against the system.

Civil Disobedience, Sabotage, and Violence    369 We can see this escalation of aims play out in the post-​ELF evolution of Craig Rosebraugh and Leslie James Pickering. After resigning as ELF press officer, Rosebraugh reached the conclusion that campaigns like the ELF’s could only produce “very minor single-​issue gains” absent broader revolutionary change (Rosebraugh 2004, p. 266). Pickering (2009, p. 169) likewise concluded that the environment could not be saved without overthrowing the US political and economic order: “It is the governmental system in this country, and similarly capitalist-​oriented systems across the globe, which foster and enable the levels of exploitation and destruction against the Earth that the Earth Liberation Front condemn. Reformist environmental efforts will continue to have insufficient overall impact so long as we allow a system that treats Earth as a commodity to reign.” There is a related strain of revolutionary thought among some radical environmentalists who advocate not only the overthrow of the state and capitalism, but of civilization itself. Anti-​civilizationism is a common theme in Earth First!’s “deep ecology,” a “biocentric” philosophy that assigns non-​human nature an equal if not greater moral priority relative to human interests (Woodhouse 2020, p. 2). Social ecologist Murray Bookchin likewise critiques civilization’s “domination and oppression”—​a critique he also applied to 1980s Earth First! activists for their “fascist” fixation on overpopulation and immigration as threats to the wilderness (Woodhouse 2020, pp. 194, 197). Beyond taking aim at (non-​white) population and immigration, some of the earliest Earth First! activists proclaimed the need to end industrial civilization. Christopher Manes (1990, p. 228) opines: “Industrialism is perhaps the greatest pyramid scheme in history. But industrial society is only the crescendo to a long line of environmentally destructive cultures that have clambered over the Earth since the rise of civilization.” Rather than toppling civilization by force, however, most Earth First!ers favor defensive activism to preserve the wilderness while “the gears of this civilization . . . grind to a halt under the immense weight of its own blundering and greed” (Wolke 1995, p. 247). The “Unabomber,” Ted Kaczynski, stands out from other anti-​civilization activists as a glaring exception. His 18-​year bombing campaign against executives and lawyers for petroleum and forestry companies (among other “technoindustrial” offenders) killed three and wounded another twenty-​three (Liddick 2006, p. 103). Yet Kaczynski worked alone, and it is doubtful whether other activists would have followed along had he approached them. In a letter to researcher Donald R. Liddick (2006, p. 106), Kaczynski laments that the “soft” environmental left “could never take the frankly brutal and reckless measures needed to bring down the technoindustrial system.” More recently, the anti-​civilization collective Deep Green Resistance has advocated a “decisive ecological warfare strategy” to “disrupt and dismantle industrial civilization.” The group’s insurgent strategy (described in detail in an eponymous book) calls for “direct militant actions against industrial infrastructure” by underground cells responding to direction from the group’s aboveground party leaders (McBay et al. 2011). Radical environmentalists, including many who condone sabotage actions, resoundingly rejected Deep Green Resistance. They took issue with the group’s vanguardism, its disregard for billions of already-​precarious human lives dependent on agriculture, its self-​defeating attacks on anarchism and veganism, and the virulent transphobia of the group’s leaders, Lierre Keith and Derrick Jensen (Earth First! Journal Collective 2013; Ruhe 2013; Sasha 2014). A question remains, however, as to whether a politically savvier group of activists might unite the various “single-​issue” struggles (environmentalism, animal rights, racial justice, anti-​capitalism,

370   Joseph M. Brown anarchism, etc.) with a revolutionary message that does not alienate large portions of the political left (Pellow 2014). I speculate on this possibility in the chapter’s concluding section.

Comparative Research Directions This analysis of radical environmentalism in the United States suggests opportunities for further comparative research. One research direction concerns the generalizability of this chapter’s key theoretical concepts. Do the patterns observed in US radical environmentalism, the stepwise escalation of tactics and the overall diversity of tactics within activist campaigns, hold in other countries? One variable that might determine the answer is democracy. The United States and several of the other countries mentioned in passing—​ Canada, France, Spain, Mexico, and the United Kingdom—​have relatively democratic political systems. In such a system, the variety of tactics permitted under law is quite wide. In more repressive systems, activists might rapidly exhaust the few legal options available and escalate to civil disobedience quickly. Will the pyramidal profile of the environmental movement hold, with the majority of activists remaining at the lowest level of tactical intensity? Or will the lowest level (legal tactics) be underdeveloped, with the great mass of activists occupying the civil disobedience level instead? Of course, illegal civil disobedience also has different consequences in liberal political systems compared to other systems. Under extremely repressive regimes, where arrests are likely to result in torture, indefinite incarceration, or execution, might activists skip the civil disobedience level of tactics and escalate immediately to sabotage or violence, hoping to achieve a political impact while evading capture? There are fruitful avenues for research on environmental activism in repressive states, asking whether activists’ tactical portfolios are just as diverse and whether the majority of activists starts with legal activism, with a few escalating to civil disobedience and even fewer escalating to sabotage or violence. There are equally fruitful avenues for research on race and intersectionality in radical environmental activism. Historically, the US environmentalist movement has been plagued by toxic whiteness—​from the Sierra Club’s John Muir (who considered Indigenous people a blemish on wilderness areas), to the anti-​immigration screeds of Edward Abbey and early Earth First!ers, to the embattled US branch of Extinction Rebellion, an organization whose singular focus on getting arrested relies on white privilege and crowds out activists of color for whom arrest is often deadly (Gayle 2019; Tompkins 2020). Cross-​nationally, does an increased salience of race as a political issue necessarily polarize discussions of radical tactics? Qualitatively, does Indigenous leadership of protests (as we often see in the United States, Canada, and Mexico) alter the dynamics around race, radicalism, and tactical choices? Another avenue of research concerns the escalation to violence. In the US context, environmentalism is historically linked to leftism. The level of environmentalist violence is very low, despite extremely high levels of violence by police and right-​wing terrorist groups in the country (German 2020). Is the relatively low frequency of environmentalist violence in the United States a consequence of the generally moribund state of violent leftism in the country—​the lack of an active Weather Underground or similar group to show environmentalists the utility of violence and potentially absorb them into a broader

Civil Disobedience, Sabotage, and Violence    371 revolutionary struggle? There is at least some evidence from France and Spain that the presence of active left-​wing terrorist groups may encourage violence on behalf of environmentalist causes. (The evidence in Spain is ambiguous since Basque environmentalists rejected ETA as an outside interloper, but the evidence from France is relatively strong.) If we were to survey countries where leftist, rather than rightist violence is the norm, are environmentalists quicker to escalate to violence and quicker to escalate from single-​issue environmentalism to broader revolutionary struggle? Finally, will environmentalists in the United States and elsewhere become increasingly radical as the climate crisis worsens? As the environmental destruction takes a more obvious toll on human life, might the urgency of the situation overcome a generally pacific movement’s reluctance to take life for the cause? Henry David Thoreau, a nature lover whose writings on civil disobedience helped to inspire Mahatma Gandhi (Hendrick 1956), nonetheless argued in favor of violent revolution when humanitarian conditions permitted no delay and political intransigence permitted no other solution. Thus, Thoreau (1859) forcefully defended abolitionist John Brown’s guerrilla campaign against antebellum slavery, a vivid humanitarian emergency in his day. Unrestrained climate change could easily take on the quality of a vivid humanitarian emergency, leaving little time for delay and dwindling prospects of mitigation under the present political order. Irish anti-​capitalist Mark Boyle (2015, pp. 20–​21) argues, We need to start being honest with ourselves about the violence inherent in industrial civilization. We need to start being honest about the scale and depth of the ecological, social and personal crises we are encountering today. And we need to start being honest about the time scales we are working with. To do so, we must put all the options available to us back on the negotiation table.

The worsening global climate may portend a dramatic escalation of environmentalists’ tactics. However, it is also possible that environmentalists will continue their present pattern, most employing legal activism, a subset escalating as necessary to civil disobedience, and an even smaller number escalating to sabotage. Given the urgency of the climate crisis, it seems likely that we will see some relative increase in the number of civil disobedience and sabotage actions, but we do not yet know whether the crisis will substantially increase environmentalists’ tolerance for violence. That answer may depend on how desperate the situation becomes.

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Pa rt I V

MARKETS AND FIRMS I N C OM PA R AT I V E E N V I RON M E N TA L P OL I T IC S

Chapter 20

T erritory, Pri vat e Au thorit y, a nd Ri g h ts The Place of Land Rights in Sustainable Agriculture and Forest Certification Tim Bartley Introduction As Saskia Sassen (2006) has argued, territory, authority, and rights have been unbundled from the nation-​state and reassembled in a variety of ways since the late twentieth century. Transnational sustainable agriculture and forestry standards provide a case in point. Initiatives such as the Forest Stewardship Council, Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil, Roundtable on Sustainable Bio-​materials, and Bonsucro represent forms of de-​territorialized private authority that seek to “govern through markets” (Cashore et al. 2004) rather than through nation-​states. On the surface, these initiatives simply set environmental and social standards for production, allow producers to be certified as compliant, and facilitate the flow of sustainability assurances from production to consumption. Yet, in doing so, they seek to govern territory from a distance, for instance by requiring companies to set aside “high conservation value” parcels of land, recognize the customary land rights of Indigenous peoples, and negotiate over the boundaries of land to be harvested. They gain authority from the market, relying on conscientious consumers, responsible investors, and reputation-​sensitive retailers to demand sustainability assurances. And they purport to enforce rights to land independent of the state. Yet the governance of land, more than most other issues covered in sustainability standards, remains deeply tied to state sovereignty. Hall (2013) argues that the link between nation, state, and land has been especially strong since the decline of colonialism. Colonial regimes sought to classify and control territory from afar, but anti-​colonial independence struggles asserted control of land as a founding condition of new nation-​states, even if contested boundaries and unequal property rights persisted. Nation-​states seek the exclusive authority to register and title land, and their capacity to do so contributes to what Mann (1986) calls “infrastructural power—​that is, states’ ability to shape action through

378   Tim Bartley logistical controls, which complements their coercive power. By Scott’s (1998) account, territorial ordering and state-​ness are mutually constitutive, as states establish, project, and legitimate their power through the control and ordering of territory. These depictions capture central tendencies in the relationship between land and nation-​states, although they overlook numerous exceptions, such as separatist movements and squatter settlements that sometimes manage to exercise territorial control (Newman 2019), territories controlled by corporations and investors (Ferguson 2006; Le Billon and Sommerville 2017) and plural, overlapping claims and jurisdictions at the subnational level (Merry 1988). Most important in the present context, Indigenous peoples often have customary rights to land that states do not recognize or only partially recognize. By some estimates, Indigenous or local communities collectively manage as much as 65 percent of the world’s land, but states formally recognize less than 20 percent of the world’s as under Indigenous or community control (Rights and Resources Initiative 2015). As a result, crops and forest products for export may come from land that companies have acquired—​or been authorized to use by the state—​that is also claimed by Indigenous or other local communities. This is partly a legacy of colonial regimes that degraded and scrambled the land claims of local people in many parts of Asia, Africa, South America, and the Middle East (Kashwan 2017; Peluso and Vandergeest 2001; see also chapter by Kimberley Suiseeya in this volume). Indeed, many scholars have argued that current struggles over resource access and “land grabs” reflect long historical processes of marginalization and dispossession, first through colonialism and then the quasi-​imperialism of international financial institutions, export-​ oriented production, and the consolidation of corporate power in the Global North (Broad and Cavanagh 2015; Hart 2006; McMichael 2012). Although states and companies may provide compensation for use of Indigenous land, the terms of compensation and power to make land use decisions are frequently contested by movements for environmental justice, Indigenous rights, and the equalization of land rights. When communities assert their claims, the boundaries and uses of land become highly volatile, as illustrated in research on resistance to land grabs (Hall et al. 2015), contested forest property (Gellert and Andiko 2015), and a variety of protests over oil or gas pipelines, from the Ogoniland of Nigeria to the Dakota Access Pipeline in the United States and the TransMountain Pipeline in Canada. Scholars have studied a variety of social movements and conflicts over rights and access to land (Gerber 2011; Levien 2018; Neville and Weinthal 2016; Sowers 2013; Wolford 2010), but this work is rarely incorporated into the burgeoning research on sustainability standards, which focuses more on firms and markets. What happens as private sustainability standards meet state structures of land control and contested claims of land rights? In what ways do private initiatives uphold or ignore Indigenous rights? Can they transcend states to provide semi-​autonomous arenas for land governance? How does this vary across initiatives and across different national contexts? This chapter takes several steps to help answer these questions and guide further investigation. I first examine the standards of 17 leading sustainable agriculture and forest certification initiatives to see how they deal with customary land rights. A majority (though not all) converge on the norm of “free and prior informed consent” (FPIC) for the use of Indigenous land, but they vary in how broadly this applies. Second, I examine research on how standards are implemented and assessed on the ground. This reveals several ways in which sustainability standards routinely undervalue Indigenous rights and accommodate the state, rather than providing alternative arenas for recognizing land claims. Yet there is also variation across countries (with some governments more supportive of Indigenous

Territory, Private Authority, and Rights    379 rights than others) and across initiatives (with some scrutinizing land rights more closely than others), though researchers have only begun to sort out the patterns. With this in mind, the chapter then looks more closely at Forest Stewardship Council certification in Indonesia and China. This comparison highlights the continuing significance of the state in granting and obscuring land rights, the difficulty of bypassing this through private certification, and the role of domestic civil society in shaping the degree to which contested boundaries and alleged land grabs are scrutinized closely by private certifiers. Finally, I highlight parallel questions about land rights in timber legality systems and payment for ecosystem service models (including in carbon markets), which suggest new avenues for comparison.

The Place of Land in Sustainability Standards Although sustainable agriculture and forestry initiatives are most commonly associated with environmental goals, nearly all of them also have standards pertaining to land rights. This partly reflects the ambiguous and contested status of land tenure in countries that export crops and forest products. But it also reflects the remarkable extent to which Indigenous rights have been folded into environmental discourses over the past three decades. Though absent from the 1972 UN Conference on the Human Environment’s Stockholm Declaration, Indigenous rights are referenced in the Agenda 21 action plan that emerged from the 1992 UN Conference on Environment and Development. They are also included in the 2015 Paris agreement of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, though in the preamble rather than a binding article, a disappointment to activists (Cultural Survival 2016). As we will see, nearly all transnational sustainable agriculture and forestry initiatives call for companies to respect Indigenous peoples’ customary land rights, though to different degrees. By some accounts, the fusion of environmental protection and Indigenous rights is crucial for supporting communities that can help to preserve biodiversity (Brondizio et al. 2009; Sunderlin et al. 2005). By other accounts, this fusion holds Indigenous rights hostage to environmental protection rationales instead of valuing them for their own sake (Li 2001). In either case, environmental protection and Indigenous rights have become intertwined in ways that current sustainability initiatives must acknowledge. The goal of this section is to examine how different sustainability standards address the customary land rights of Indigenous peoples—​that is, claims to land that are justified by custom and tradition but not necessarily recognized by the state. To cast a wide net, I examine the 17 most prominent transnational standards for sustainable agriculture or forestry. This list includes nearly all of the sustainable agriculture initiatives catalogued by Fransen et al. (2020) (excluding only the Flower Label Program, which is defunct, and Social Accountability International, which is focused on labor conditions) and adds the two main sustainable forestry programs (the Forest Stewardship Council and the Programme for the Endorsement of Forest Certification), as well as one newer agriculture program (the Global Roundtable on Responsible Beef). Based on the publicly disclosed standards as of March 2020, I examined the relevant text and grouped initiatives based on their approach. A large majority of these sustainability standards (70.5 percent) include a recognition of Indigenous peoples’ customary land rights. Most (59 percent) require companies to

380   Tim Bartley obtain Free and Prior Informed Consent (FPIC) for the use of land claimed by Indigenous communities. Most of the major commodity roundtables (e.g., Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil, Roundtable on Sustainable Biomaterials), forest certification initiatives, and several other sustainable agriculture programs (e.g., the Rainforest Alliance, Fairtrade International, and the Global Coffee Platform) specify this procedure. This convergence on requiring FPIC reflects not only the harmonization of approaches in the field of sustainability governance but also the institutionalization of FPIC in international agreements. The terminology of “free, prior, and informed consent” first rose to prominence in the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (adopted by the UN General Assembly in 2007). This expanded on the language of participation and consultation in the International Labor Organization’s (ILO) Convention 169 on Indigenous and Tribal Peoples (1989) and on the language of involvement and approval by Indigenous peoples in the Convention on Biological Diversity’s (1992) statements on the application of “indigenous and traditional knowledge” (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations 2006). The Forest Stewardship Council used the language of “free and informed consent” for the use of Indigenous people’s land starting with its first approved standard in 1994, and shifted to the new norm of “free, prior, and informed consent” in 2012. Despite this convergence, there are several notable differences in how sustainability standards use FPIC. I have labeled these Standard FPIC, Conditional FPIC, and Enhanced FPIC in Table 20.1. The Standard FPIC approach requires companies to provide evidence that free and prior informed consent has been granted for the use of land where Indigenous people have customary rights. Bonsucro, which certifies sugarcane farms, states, for instance, that when legal or customary land rights “have been relinquished to the benefit of the operator, the operator shall demonstrate the decision was taken by Free Prior Informed Consent and negotiated” (Bonsucro 2016, p. 15). In the Conditional FPIC variant, the requirement for consent is subject to caveats or omissions that adopt the discourse of FPIC without requiring it in all situations. The Rainforest Alliance’s Sustainable Agriculture Standard, for example, exempts smallholder farms from the requirement that “activities diminishing the land or resource use rights or collective interests of communities are conducted only after having received the communities’ free, prior and informed consent (FPIC)” (Rainforest Alliance 2017, p. 48). This illustrates a reluctance to apply a blanket norm of FPIC across all types of operations, seemingly to avoid overburdening smallholders. The Better Cotton Initiative requires companies to respect Indigenous rights and obtain FPIC when converting nonagricultural land to agricultural uses, but it does not cover land that is already being used for agricultural purposes (Better Cotton Initiative 2018). Only one initiative, the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC), has what I have labeled an Enhanced FPIC approach. In addition to standard FPIC requirements, the FSC requires companies to actively engage with local people to identify conflicts, and it requires consent agreements to be specific about “duration, provisions for renegotiation, renewal, termination, economic conditions . . . and provision for monitoring by Indigenous Peoples” (Forest Stewardship Council 2015, p. 12). The FSC also requires companies to mitigate harms and recognize traditional rights among non-​Indigenous communities, though consent is not required here. (The distinction between Indigenous and non-​Indigenous communities is obviously fraught. The FSC’s definitions prioritize community self-​identification while also noting pre-​colonial histories, language, cultural practices, and, in some, circumstances recognition in national law; Forest Stewardship Council 2015.) The Programme for the Endorsement of

Territory, Private Authority, and Rights    381 Table 20.1 Customary Land Rights in Transnational Sustainability Standards Initiative

Approach to customary land rights

Forest Stewardship Council (FSC)

Enhanced FPIC

Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO)

Standard FPIC

Roundtable on Sustainable Biomaterials (RSB)

Standard FPIC

Round Table on Responsible Soy (RTRS)

Standard FPIC

Bonsucro

Standard FPIC

Rainforest Alliance Sustainable Agriculture Standard

Conditional FPIC

Global Coffee Platform/​4C

Conditional FPIC

Better Cotton Initiative

Conditional FPIC

Fairtrade International

Conditional FPICa

Programme for the Endorsement of Forest Certification (PEFC)

Mixed (e.g., Standard FPIC in Malaysia, Russia; Conditional FPIC in Brazil)

International Sustainability & Carbon Certification (ISCC)

Recognition without Procedure

International Federation of Organic Agriculture Movements (IFOAM)

Recognition without Procedure

The Utz Sustainable Agriculture Standard

Noneb

Global Roundtable on Responsible Beef (GRSB)

None

Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center’s Bird Friendly Coffee standard (SMBC)

None

MPS Florimark

None

Cotton Made in Africa (CMmiA)

Nonec

a

  In Standard for Hired Labor   Utz has recently merged with the Rainforest Alliance, and their new consolidated draft standard resembles the Rainforest Alliance’s approach to FPIC. c   New draft standards, if approved, would put this initiative in the Recognition without Procedure category. b

Forest Certification, the FSC’s competitor, includes FPIC in its global benchmarks (PEFC 2018) but leaves the specifics to national initiatives, which vary in their approaches. The PEFC affiliate in Brazil, for instance, requires respect for Indigenous rights in the certification of natural forests but not the development of timber plantations, and it subsumes customary rights to formal law, saying that local, traditional, and Indigenous rights “shall be respected, according to the legislation in force” (Associação Brasileira de Normas Técnicas 2004, p. 5). The Recognition without Procedure approach recognizes customary rights but does not specify how they are to be respected or what form of consent is needed. The International Sustainability & Carbon Certification (ISCC) standards, for instance, require that “traditional land rights have been secured” and that “the rights of Indigenous people must be respected,” but they do not define how rights and permissions should be secured (International Sustainability and Carbon Certification 2016, p. 41). Procedures might be similar to FPIC in practice, but it is not clear from what is specified on paper.

382   Tim Bartley Finally, five initiatives (29 percent) have essentially no current standards pertaining to customary land rights. In some cases, such as the MPS Florimark label for flowers and the Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center’s Bird Friendly Coffee standard, land rights are simply not mentioned. In other cases, land is mentioned but not explicitly tied to customary rights. The Global Roundtable on Responsible Beef, for instance, requires that “cultural heritage and way of life of all parties are recognized and respected” and that “land and property rights are acknowledged and respected” (p. 9), but it does not link the two with a recognition of customary land rights (Global Roundtable for Sustainable Beef 2014, p. 9). As noted in the table, current revisions of standards will likely shrink the “None” group in the coming years. In sum, looking at standards on paper, one can see a convergence on FPIC and a bit of divergence in how it is defined and used. In requiring respect for customary rights of Indigenous communities, most sustainability standards endorse an extralegal conception of land rights, wherein companies pledge to respect informal rights that may or may not be recognized by the state.

Land Rights and FPIC in Practice It is possible that what is written into standards—​including different approaches to FPIC—​ matters less than how standards are implemented and assessed on the ground. As certifiers examine a wide range of environmental and social dimensions of farms and forests, how much emphasis is placed on land rights and community claims? How do auditors gather evidence about claims, consent, and compensation agreements? What do companies seeking certification need to do to be deemed compliant? Research on sustainability standards has barely begun to answer these questions, much less to provide systematic comparisons across initiatives, approaches, or countries. Nevertheless, based on studies in Colombia, Brazil, Ecuador, Bolivia, Indonesia, Malaysia, Cambodia, and beyond, the existing research points to several factors that shape the practical application of FPIC and often diminish its impact. First, when auditors assess compliance, the evidence they collect is often thin and potentially biased toward the claims of companies. Looking at Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) certification in Indonesia, Silva-​Castañeda (2012) argues that auditors prioritize the documentary and formal legal evidence that companies can provide while discounting the narratives of local residents. Palm oil companies have “a wall full of documents” to show, as one auditor put it, such as a cultivation permits from the central government, a land certificate signed by the village head, and possibly signed compensation agreements (Silva-​Castañeda 2012, p. 367). Community members may rely on testimony and their knowledge of plants growing on the land to prove their claims, but auditors rarely know how to process this kind of proof. Looking at the auditing instructions given by the Roundtable on Sustainable Biofuels/​ Biomaterials, Fortin and Richardson (2013) argue that it would be easy to overlook or discount community claims. Auditors are instructed to look at documents from stakeholder consultations among other things, but “while a written record that a majority of people at a particular ‘stakeholder meeting’ raised their hand to indicate their consent to resettlement might provide ‘objective evidence’ for these purposes, it would hardly prove the absence of

Territory, Private Authority, and Rights    383 dispute” (p. 148). Although guidance for auditors varies across initiatives and has generally become more extensive over time, some questions remain difficult to translate into pre-​ made guidelines. As articulated by Chao et al. (2012), “Who has the right to consent when there are plural stakeholders involved, including different communities and sub-​groups within communities whose opinions differ? . . . Once given, can it be renegotiated and if so, when and under what conditions?” (p. 13). Based on the existing research, it appears that sustainability standards have failed to tackle these vexing questions. Certainly they are not alone, as participation and conflict resolution processes promoted by the World Bank and other multilateral organizations have also proved thin in many cases (Goldman 2005; Haines and Macdonald 2020). Second, implementing FPIC usually means forging an agreement on compensation for the use of land. This means translating claims about rights into monetary compensation, a process fraught with tension over nonmonetary values of land and attributions of fault (Silva-​Castañeda 2015). Moreover, communities may be negotiating without the power to actually say “no.” If companies and governments have already invested in the development of large-​scale agricultural plantations, or governments have already granted logging concessions to a company, the best that community members may be able to do is delay and complicate the project in hopes of increasing their compensation. In some cases, they can turn to other overseers, as one campaign against the palm oil company Wilmar did in shifting from the RSPO to the World Bank’s Compliance Advisor Ombudsman (Haines and Macdonald 2020). Still, ejecting the planned project in favor of an alternative land use is highly unlikely—​and rarely if ever documented in the research on sustainability standards. Communities’ bargaining power tends to be weaker when they lack formal legal rights to land (McCarthy 2009). On the other hand, a robust local organization should strengthen communities’ bargaining position, especially if national political circumstances are also supportive. Examining conflicts over mining in Bolivia, Amengual (2018) shows that more cohesive communities gained more inclusive benefits from mining companies than less cohesive ones, and that this ultimately led to greater acceptance of the companies as well. In contrast, where communities were more fragmented—​among different sets of workers and villagers, for instance—​companies provided benefits for particular segments but struggled to gain trust or “buy stability.” In the context of the Morales government’s mix of real and symbolic threats of nationalizing mines in Bolivia, “the state’s actions amplified the need for firms to gain and maintain local support, but did not determine how firms distributed benefits” (Amengual 2018, p. 37). More broadly, a focus on local structures of cohesion and representation, which has been central to many studies of environmental mobilization (e.g., Auyero and Swistun 2009; Schlosberg and Carruthers 2010; Steinberg 2019), would also be beneficial for research on sustainability standards, which has often focused on broad global and national patterns. Third, beyond compensation agreements, auditors often push companies to create dispute resolution procedures. As several scholars have pointed out, these can allow companies to achieve certification without meaningfully rectifying past injustices (Fortin and Richardson 2013; Nesadurai 2013). They are also consistent with a larger “process over performance” tendency in sustainability certification, wherein what appear to be performance standards are assessed with an emphasis on the establishment of management systems and processes rather than performance outcomes (Bartley 2018).

384   Tim Bartley Nesadurai (2013) argues that RSPO certification “is not usually denied even if land conflicts or adverse impacts on local/​Indigenous communities are present provided the plantation company has put in place a consultative or conflict mediation process acceptable to all stakeholders to address these issues” (Nesadurai 2013, p. 517, emphasis added). Dispute resolution procedures may provide useful channels for community claims, but they also prioritize the management of ongoing conflicts over the remediation of past injustices. Moreover, dispute resolution processes created through private certification channels are fleeting in the face of market change. In the case of the palm oil company Wilmar mentioned earlier, attempts to go through the RSPO to remedy injustices in one plantation fell apart after Wilmar sold off the controversial operation (Haines and Macdonald 2020). Fourth, some scholars have argued that sustainability standards’ narrow approach to customary land rights has indirectly served to legitimate large-​scale development projects while sidelining smallholder farmers and redistributive political agendas. In Colombia, Genoud (2020) argues that RSPO certification has shielded companies and the state from greater responsibility for implementing land redistrubution plans in the post-​conflict peace agreement. Companies have been able to document their land claims, but peasants have faced incomplete land titling, legacies of displacement by paramilitaries, and charges of being “false claimants” in negotiations over FPIC. Ultimately, the RSPO has endorsed the “government’s vision of the post-​conflict as an opportunity for economic development through large-​scale land investments” rather than “rural populations’ hope for fairer land access” (Genoud 2020) (p. 12). Similarly, Selfa et al. (2014) call Bonsucro’s focus on clear land titling “particularly naïve” in Colombia, where they argue that Bonsucro has legitimated large-​scale landownership and helped to consolidate the sugarcane industry’s power while sidelining debates about the country’s extreme inequality in landholding. In Ecuador, Johnson (2014) argues, the RSPO’s requirements for clear land titles have helped to consolidate state control and large-​scale landholding while ignoring informal land claims and the Ley of Comunas system. An important question for further research concerns the conditions under which sustainability standards play any discernible role in the domestic politics of land use and distribution. In many countries, sustainability standards may be only on the margins of these debates or only relevant to small niches. In others, where a large push for certification meets an unsettled domestic politics of land, sustainability standards may indeed be legitimating some developmental agendas over others.

The FSC and Forest Land in Indonesia and China Cross-​national comparisons have frequently been used to explain differential support for the FSC vis-​à-​vis its competitors (Cashore et al. 2004; Espach 2009), but they are rare in the study of certification’s consequences. Looking at a particular initiative in different national contexts can shed important light on how stated principles about land rights turn into varied practices on the ground. In this section, I provide a brief description of the FSC’s

Territory, Private Authority, and Rights    385 standards on land as put into practice in Indonesia and China (Bartley 2018). Though not representative of all countries or initiatives, this provides a closer look at ambiguity and contestation over land rights under the glare of a leading sustainability initiative. Indonesia has long been central to the global forest products industry, and, in the 1990s and 2000s, it experienced massive amounts of deforestation to feed the growth of timber and pulp and paper mills (Barr 2001; Ruslandi et al. 2011). China became the world’s leading producer of plywood, wood furniture, and many paper products in the period from 2000 to 2010, based both on timber imports and China’s own large tracts of forest land and expanding timber plantations (Sun et al. 2004; Trac et al. 2007). The two countries make an interesting comparison due to the difference in their political regimes, with Indonesia’s transition to democracy starting in 1998 (Aspinall 2005) and a resilient form of authoritarian governance in China (Gallagher 2017). This provides an opportunity to consider how domestic governance—​including the strength of the state and shape of civil society—​shape the application of transnational sustainability standards.

Indonesia Indonesia is a fascinating and important case for the study of forest certification and its main multistakeholder initiative, the FSC. One of the first independent certification projects occurred in Indonesia in 1990, when the Rainforest Alliance certified the teak plantations of the state forestry company in Java, Perum Perhutani. After the founding of the FSC in 1993, several Perum Perhutani operations joined the first wave of FSC-​certified forests in the Global South. Yet the company’s “custodial-​paramilitary approach” to land (Peluso 1992) became impossible to overlook by the late 1990s, especially once General Suharto fell from power in 1998 and Indonesia began a period of democratic reform. After Perhutani’s armed guards killed one villager, the company’s FSC certificates were suspended in 2001 (Donovan 2001). Eventually, the company disarmed guards and introduced new systems of community-​based forest management on the path to recertification of some areas in 2011–​2012. But villagers’ rights were fragile at best since the company retained the power to decide how the land would be used—​and derailed at least one campaign to democratize land use decisions (Nomura 2008). Elsewhere in Indonesia, attempts to promote FSC certification collided with an ambiguous and contested set of land rights. Since the Indonesian constitution of 1945, Indonesian law has symbolically recognized the customary land rights of Indigenous peoples, in some respect continuing and repurposing the two-​tiered system of formal and customary law imposed by Dutch colonial authorities (Fitzpatrick 1997). But Indonesian law also came to subsume customary law to the “national interest” and define nearly all forest land as the property of the state (Lucas and Warren 2003). During and after the Suharto era, the Ministry of Forestry typically granted timber concessions to logging companies without regard for the customary claims of Indigenous communities, most notably, the various Dayak peoples of heavily forested (and now deforested) Kalimantan. Decentralization reforms in the late 1990s made even official state designations extremely messy (McCarthy 2004). Meanwhile, as space for civil society increased, land rights activists increasingly used “Indigeneity as a vehicle to counter dispossession” (Li 2010, p. 399), forming nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and networks to press for recognition of customary rights.

386   Tim Bartley This shifting and contentious politics of land created a weak foundation for FSC certification and contributed to its slow growth. After a decade of promotion, only nine forest management enterprises were FSC-​certified in Indonesia in 2009, amounting to less than 2 percent of all “production forest” area in the country. This was a stark contrast to 15–​ 20 percent rates of FSC certification in Brazil, Russia, and Cameroon at that time. The amount of FSC-​certified land in Indonesia did eventually increase after additional projects to promote and subsidize certification, roughly tripling from 2009 to its peak in 2017 (FSC Facts and Figures, July 4, 2017). Still, it is telling that some companies’ attempts to become certified dragged on for years. PT Intracawood’s concession in East Kalimantan was first assessed for FSC certification in 2001, at which point auditors required the company to map community land claims and establish a forum for resolving land disputes. It was finally certified in 2005, although auditors continued to ask for more evidence that the company was implementing the results of mapping projects and resolving disputes (SmartWood 2006). Sari Bumi Kusuma’s concession in Central Kalimantan took 5 years (2002–​2007) to become FSC-​certified. The auditors acknowledged that “the concession was granted originally by the government without adequate consultation with local people,” and it noted worsening community relations since 2002 and “increasing claims for compensation by local people . . ., usually with encouragement by local NGOs or certain individuals” (SmartWood 2007, p. 12). When the certificate was granted, auditors were still asking the company to “implement a procedure for identification and mapping of Indigenous people’s land use rights” (SmartWood 2007, p. 17). As these cases indicate, auditors did pay attention to Indigenous land claims, and this led them to push companies to negotiate with communities over boundaries and compensation and to create dispute resolution procedures. Methods for assessing consent varied, but auditors generally relied on public consultation meetings and interviews with selected community members. Recognizing the importance of civil society in this process, one participant in auditing teams noted that “you’re lucky if there’s an NGO there,” or it can be difficult to understand the situation through consultations (Interview with forestry researcher, Bogor, June 30, 2008). As the FSC shifted from requiring “free and informed consent” to “free, prior, and informed consent” in 2012, this added to the complications. “The company already has the concession,” explained one practitioner. “To really do FPIC, you’d need the company to consult with the community at the beginning” (Interview with NGO representative/​researcher, Bogor, September 8, 2010). When it came to the general legitimacy of land tenure, though, auditors mainly took a pragmatic approach that accepted state designations even if these were lacking in legitimacy. Indigenous land rights advocates have argued that the state’s method of granting timber concessions is inconsistent with the idea of FPIC and that much forest land has not even been fully mapped and demarcated to the standards of Indonesian law (Colchester et al. 2003). Certification bodies recognized this problem but generally took the pragmatic position that, as one auditor put it, “When we come to the certification, the assumption is that if the company gets a concession from the central government, it is legal to operate” (Interview with auditor, Bogor, September 8, 2010). “Whose fault is it that the community was ignored in land use rights originally?” asked another practitioner rhetorically, suggesting that it would not be appropriate to hold companies responsible for prior illegitimate acts by the state (Interview with NGO representative, Jakarta, July 8, 2008). In short,

Territory, Private Authority, and Rights    387 even where certification bodies were pushed to take community negotiations seriously, they reverted to state designations rather fully embracing extralegal conceptions of land tenure.

China The forests of China have gone through several waves of overcutting and reforestation since the mid-​twentieth century (Trac et al. 2007). FSC certification came to China around 2000, with support from Ikea, which was promoting certification in its supply chain, and from the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) and its Chinese sponsor, the State Forestry Administration. The first wave of FSC certificates focused mainly on state-​owned and state-​ managed forestry operations in the northern part of the country. Although questions arose about the ability of certifiers to adequately assess logging practices in large operations, land tenure was relatively uncomplicated in these areas due to the long history of state ownership and control of this forest land. This changed with a second wave of FSC certification, which was still driven by export markets but focused more on timber plantation projects in the south. To supplement harvests from northern forests and reduce reliance on imported timber, the Chinese government had begun to promote large, fast-​growing timber plantations. Establishing these sometimes meant converting low-​yield “semi-​natural” forests to plantations and securing land-​use rights from rural village councils or individual households. This put FSC certification in a different terrain, in which land tenure and community relations were more fraught. For 50 years, control of collective forest land in China had been reformed and re-​ reformed to a point of “deliberate institutional ambiguity” that made it nearly impossible to answer the question, “who owns the land?” (Ho 2001, p. 420). Reforms in the early 2000s gave some village councils or other collective bodies the rights to lease the use of forest land, though by law they should get approval from at least two-​thirds of the members.1 In other areas, quasi-​privatization reforms began to give individual households the right to transfer their land use rights. This increased incomes for some but also allowed companies and land speculators to take advantage of desperate, poorly informed villagers (Robbins and Harrell 2014). As summarized by van Rooij, “despite the stronger formal recognition of farmers’ land use rights . . . land tenure security remains weak in China. The largest threat has been a sharp rise over the last decade of cases in which farmers lost their land use rights and received little to no compensation” (p. 436). In China, Indigenous rights are by official accounts irrelevant since the government recognizes “ethnic minorities” but not Indigenous peoples (Wang 2004). The FSC’s certifiers generally accepted this approach, whether by simply marking Indigenous rights as “not applicable in China” (Scientific Certification Systems 2010, p. 24) or by noting that Indigenous groups could not be identified in the sites to be certified. One report stated simply that “no indigenous people are to be found within or near the FMU [forest management unit]” (SGS Qualifor 2010, p. 26), despite noting elsewhere in the report that most local residents were of the Zhuang ethnic minority group, which at least some scholars would describe as Indigenous (Kaup 2000). Still, auditors were charged with assessing FSC requirements for clear land tenure and the mitigation of grievances with local communities, which could easily be complicated given the “deliberate institutional ambiguity” described earlier.

388   Tim Bartley In one major case, auditors paid scant attention to the ambiguities of land rights. The Hong Kong-​based timber company Sino-​Forest used its ties to local and provincial governments in Guangdong province to secure land access from village collectives for its timber plantations (Hoffman and MacKinnon 2011). When one area was assessed for FSC certification, the auditors’ interviews with villagers did not find reason for concern, and the certificate was granted (SmartWood 2005). Yet later allegations of fraud against Sino-​ Forest—​for inflating its timber holdings to drive up its stock price—​revealed strong-​arm land acquisition tactics that the company had used in its other plantations and possibly in the FSC-​certified area as well (MacKinnon 2011). In a second major case, involving the FSC certification of Stora Enso’s timber plantation in Guangxi Province, land conflicts came to light prior to certification, but auditors were satisfied with thin, procedural solutions. A state-​owned company, created to acquire land for Stora Enso, had used intimidation and misleading tactics to secure permission from villagers (Li and Nielsen 2010). After international NGOs revealed this, Stora Enso began reviewing contracts and pursuing FSC certification. Auditors met with villagers to check the status of conflicts and pushed for some further improvements, but these mainly concerned the company’s dispute resolution procedures. Company representatives were present during many of the interviews, and auditors found only one local NGO to consult, which was closely tied to the local government. Echoing the company’s framing of disputes as stemming from “historic reasons and unclear documentation” (Stora Enso 2009, p. 17), the auditors ultimately deemed many of the remaining problems as “historical issues, not directly attributable to Stora Enso” (interview with auditor, March 27, 2014). Just 6 months after the preassessment, the Stora Enso plantation received FSC certification. The speed with which this apparent land grab was certified is especially notable in comparison to Indonesian cases, where consultations and corrective actions related to land rights sometimes stretched for years.

Implications This brief examination of FSC certification in Indonesia and China suggests two broader propositions about the relationship between land rights, the state, and transnational sustainability standards (see Bartley [2018] for additional details on the cases and a larger set of theoretical implications). First, even when transnational standards endorse land rights that go beyond national law, deference to the state is common in the assessment of compliance. This can be seen in auditors’ pragmatic deference to state-​granted timber concessions in Indonesia, which ignored Indigenous rights, and in auditors’ reluctance to problematize state-​sponsored land acquisition tactics in China.2 Second, the strength and legitimacy of civil society matters. In democratizing Indonesia, open contention over the rights of Indigenous communities complicated and delayed a number of forest management certifications. This created at least the potential for meaningful boundary-​mapping and negotiation over rights and compensation, even if these did not always materialize. In authoritarian China, auditors faced little pressure to use maximalist definitions of compliance with FSC standards. This must be attributed in part to the limits of “semi-​civil society” in China, which is dependent on state authorization (Spires 2011), and the status of land rights as a “sensitive” issue (Cai 2008), leaving few independent

Territory, Private Authority, and Rights    389 watchdogs in this space. To be sure, NGOs, journalists, and other civic actors in China have often effectively publicized concerns about pollution, hazardous facilities, and consumer safety. But, even when addressing problems less sensitive than land, these actors have had to work within tight constraints, given “continued party-​state dominance and a schizophrenic recognition [by government officials] that new actors are both necessary and, at times, threatening” (van Rooij et al. 2016, p. 9).

Looking Forward and Outward Leading sustainable agriculture and forest certification initiatives require legitimate land tenure and endorse global norms about the customary rights of Indigenous communities. In practice, though, they frequently accommodate the state’s approach to land tenure and reduce “free and prior informed consent” to something like “negotiation without the power to say ‘no.’ ” Activism and scrutiny vary across national contexts, but it remains to be seen if there are some settings where FPIC procedures and compensation negotiations have significantly increased the power of marginalized villagers. Given the tendency of sustainability certification to discursively endorse Indigenous rights but sidestep or struggle with them in practice, it is difficult to see how it could play a major role in equalizing access. The rise of private sustainability standards might instead help to legitimate consolidated landholding and perhaps even what Ferguson (2006) calls “socially thin” sites of extraction, which are walled-​off literally or symbolically from their local contexts. These conclusions stem from research on private sustainability standards, but there are striking and rarely explored parallels in some intergovernmental environmental policy arenas. In particular, there is a growing literature on land in the climate “regime complex,” showing how land rights pertain to carbon offset markets and payment for ecosystem services (Larson et al. 2013). Yet this research is rarely connected to work on private sustainability standards. In addition, the past decade has seen the rise of a “transnational timber legality regime” through laws that penalize illegal logging, as described later (Bartley 2014). This adds a new dimension to the relationship between communities, timber companies, the state, and global markets, which deserves to be unpacked. To conclude this chapter on a forward-​looking and outward-​looking note, I briefly consider what is known about land rights in these other arenas and what could be gained from research that compares them with private sustainability standards.

Payment for Ecosystem Services The link between Indigenous land rights and environmental protection is institutionalized not only in private sustainability standards but also in intergovernmental initiatives focused on climate change. In particular, programs that seek to fund the preservation of carbon-​rich forests have had to take stock of the rights of forest-​dwelling people. Carbon offset markets and related systems of “payment for ecosystem services” have grown in prominence since the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement, particularly through the expansion of the Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+​) initiative, part of the UN

390   Tim Bartley Framework Convention on Climate Change (Blum and Lövbrand 2019). The recent development of a Tropical Forestry Standard for the California carbon market has brought additional attention to the place of land rights in payments for ecosystem services. Since 2010, REDD+​projects have been expected to respect the rights of Indigenous peoples. Though FPIC is not explicitly required in all cases, it has become the standard way to demonstrate respect for customary land rights (Springer and Retana 2014; Suiseeya 2017). As with private sustainability standards, research suggests that this principle is often diminished on the ground (Chomba et al. 2016; Larson et al. 2013). In an account that could also apply to private standards, Dehm (2016) argues that REDD+​paradoxically posits clear land tenure as both a precondition for conservation goals and as an outcome of the conservation project. In practice, she argues, the precondition is rarely met. A project is planned regardless of land tenure and then participants are expected to sort out rights and permissions without derailing the project. As with private sustainability standards, it appears that the right of local people to say “no” is rarely a true option. It is quite plausible that the further growth of carbon credits for reduced deforestation will spread thin FPIC processes to more locations. Several innovations in carbon markets, however, deserve closer attention. A shift to jurisdictional approaches, which assess land tenure at the scale of political jurisdictions rather than particular projects, may hold more potential for empowering land rights advocates (Irawan et al. 2019). Setyowati (2020) analyzes a case in Indonesia in which land tenure standards in REDD+​effectively facilitated processes of participatory mapping that expanded Indigenous rights as well as expanding provincial forest governance vis-​à-​vis central government control. Important questions remain, though, about the conditions for these kinds of changes to occur. They appear to depend at a minimum on a high degree of mobilization by Indigenous rights activists, governments that are not actively hostile to these claims, and a focus on a jurisdictional level that has the authority to grant meaningful land rights. At the same time, payment for ecosystem services initiatives may be abandoning claims about land rights for alternative conceptions of local participation. Greenleaf ’s (2020) research in Brazil highlights a shift toward incentivizing “green labor” by local residents rather than trying to clarify and grant land rights. This seems to facilitate the production of ecosystem services, but it also increases the state’s discretion over when, how, and to whom incentives are paid (Greenleaf 2020). Surprisingly, research on land rights in REDD+​has rarely been integrated with work on sustainability standards. One productive route would simply to be compare efforts to secure land rights that intersect with REDD+​projects (or other payment for ecosystem services initiatives) with efforts that intersect with sustainability certification. This would help to reveal whether and how the form of external intervention shapes local configurations of rights.

Timber Legality Over the past decade, standards for sustainability in forest management have been supplemented by new regulation of the legality of timber operations. The European Union’s project on Forest Law Enforcement, Governance, and Trade (FLEGT) spawned Voluntary

Territory, Private Authority, and Rights    391 Partnership Agreements with Indonesia, Cameroon, Ghana, and several other timber exporting countries, which created new systems for verifying the legality of timber operations. Meanwhile, a 2008 extension of the Lacey Act in the United States, the EU Timber Regulation of 2010, and subsequent policies in Australia and Japan banned the sale of illegally harvested wood products, allowing penalties to be applied to the seller of these products (i.e., retailers and brands) based on the illegality in their supply chains. This “transnational timber legality regime” recenters the state in two ways: it foregrounds domestic law in the country of harvesting, and it is enforced partly through market access regulations in large consumer countries (Bartley 2018). The consequences for land rights are not yet clear. In Indonesia, Indigenous and environmental justice NGOs were involved in multistakeholder dialogues to design the Timber Legality Assurance System (Sistem Verifikasi Legalitas Kayu or SVLK), which then received EU endorsement. But NGOs failed to get a full assessment of land tenure incorporated into the definition of timber legality, which ended up focusing on the validity of permits and performance of an environmental impact assessment. NGOs nevertheless created new networks to take advantage of “independent monitoring” provisions which give them some degree of oversight over the legality verification process. The short-​term result has been a series of exposés of timber companies’ evasion strategies and auditors’ laxity (Anti Forest-​ Mafia Coalition 2014; Independent Forestry Monitoring Network (JPIK) 2016) and, generally, more public information about opaque timber industries. In combination with other changes in Indonesia—​including a 2013 Constitutional Court decision that upended previous conceptions of state control over forests (Natahadibrata 2013)—​scrutiny of timber legality may help to increase the power of land rights advocacy. On the other hand, a crackdown on illegal logging may well privilege large and politically connected companies, criminalize those with informal land claims, and legitimate environmentally damaging state policies (Buhmann and Nathan 2012; McDermott et al. 2015; Ros-​ Tonen et al. 2013). In Indonesia, some scholars have worried that an apparent strengthening of the rule of law could consolidate elite power, given that “the activities of poor and Indigenous people living in and around the forest areas are much more often criminalized than activities of companies” (Gellert and Andiko 2015, p. 659). More generally, a focus on timber legality applies a crime control solution to a socio-​political problem, so the approach may prove contrary to attempts to expand the rights of marginalized groups. Legality is a multivalent concept, and its concrete implications for forest land rights will likely vary across places and times. Further comparative work is needed to assess the extent to which land rights advocates can leverage timber legality regulations. This is likely to depend at a minimum on the strength of domestic social movements, the priorities of the government in power, and the country’s place in timber supply chains. It is also important to compare legality and sustainability as platforms for expanding or clarifying land rights, including customary claims. Scholars have theorized the interplay of legality and sustainability in the market and policy-​making arenas (Bartley 2014; Cashore and Stone 2012; Overdevest and Zeitlin 2014), but little research compares these approaches on the ground. Private sustainability standards make strong claims about customary land rights and FPIC, but they rest on thin assessments and distant markets for enforcement. They may be a poor fit with the goals of land rights and environmental justice movements, but they are less likely to criminalize marginalized resource users. Legality regimes have a narrower and more formalistic view of land rights, but they have a wider scope of

392   Tim Bartley application, a stronger connection to the state, and more locally embedded watchdogs. It would be useful to compare these approaches on the ground as they are enacted and contested by firms, state agencies, and social movements. This would greatly expand knowledge about the intertwining of territory, authority, and rights in forested areas. To conclude on a forward-​looking note, future trajectories in the expansion of land rights have been thrown into disarray by the COVID-​19 pandemic and related disruptions of 2020. At the time of this chapter’s writing, a confusing array of trends appear imminent—​ toward growing authoritarianism, disintegration of the global economy, simplification of supply chains, temporary reductions in carbon emissions, and renewed mobilization against racism and marginalization. The pandemic has provided cover for some commodity producers in Indonesia, Brazil, and perhaps elsewhere to aggressively assert control over disputed land in forested areas (Jong 2020; Phillips 2020). At the same time, Europe is planning a “Green Deal” toward recovery, and investors’ interest in environmental, social, and governance indicators is surging. The future is obviously uncertain, but it is likely to be written in part by the intersection of global environmental policy, local and national contestation over land rights, and the balance of marginalization and mobilization in the Global South.

Notes 1. Law of the People’s Republic of China on Land Contract in Rural Areas, 2002 2. For much more on how the Chinese state constrained the FSC’s space to operate, see Bartley (2018).

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Chapter 21

C omparing Volu nta ry Su stainabi l i t y Standa rd s Blindspots, Biases, and Pathways Forward Hamish van der Ven Introduction It has been a quarter century since the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) emerged and established one of the world’s first transnational, voluntary sustainability standards (VSS). A VSS is essentially a set of rules that aim to steer the behavior of businesses toward social and environmental goals. Often, these standards are created and managed by non-​state actors and operate across national borders. VSS are therefore a type of transnational environmental governance insofar as they perform the act of governing in the absence of a formalized world government. In the years since the FSC emerged, a voluminous body of academic literature has examined every facet of the FSC and other examples of VSS (Cashore, Newsom, and Auld 2004; van der Ven 2019, see also chapter by Bartley, this volume). The comparative method is at the center of this body of literature. Some scholars study how the design and implementation of particular standards has changed over time (Auld 2014; Ponte, Gibbon, and Vestergaard 2011). Others compare the impact of social movements on VSS (Bloomfield 2017). Still others explore the implementation of VSS across democratic and authoritarian settings (Bartley 2018). The focus of this chapter is specifically on journal articles where two or more VSS are compared to one another. I investigate broad patterns and trends in the comparative VSS literature to assess where gaps or biases in this research agenda may exist.1 Drawing on an original dataset of 117 journal articles published in the past 20 years and coded according to their discipline, methodology, and focus, I answer a number of interrelated research questions: First, which disciplines and journals are the primary venue for comparative VSS research? Second, what types of research methods do scholars use when comparing VSS? Third, which sectors and standards receive the most attention? Fourth, which regions receive the most attention? And fifth, what are the criteria by which VSS are compared? The

Comparing Voluntary Sustainability Standards     399 answers to these questions are vital for illuminating biases or limits to external validity in extant research and charting a future research agenda. In brief, I find that some of the most important questions about VSS—​namely, can it actually achieve desirable environmental impacts?—​remain underresearched. The data suggest that comparisons of standard design and governance outweigh comparisons of environmental impact by a factor of 10 to 1. Second, I find that articles comparing VSS focus overwhelmingly on a handful of sectors: namely, forestry, fisheries, and organic produce. Within these sectors, research tends to focus on the largest and oldest VSS: the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC), Marine Stewardship Council (MSC), and Rainforest Alliance, among others. The weight of attention to these particular VSS and the tendency toward small-​N qualitative comparisons raise concerns about sample bias and the external validity of inductively derived hypotheses derived from these sectors. Third, I find a regional bias toward studying VSS in northern industrialized countries to the detriment of VSS originating in the Global South. Here, too, both theoretical and empirical concerns emerge within the extant research agenda inasmuch as it does not focus enough on the different characteristics of VSS in countries that are not members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) or on/​in the primary sites of environmental degradation. The chapter proceeds as follows: the next section describes the research strategy through which the dataset was built and outlines the parameters on which articles are coded. I then present descriptive statistics from the dataset and review/​discuss the results for each variable. The final section concludes by offering some thoughts on the future direction of comparative VSS research.

Assessing Two Decades of Research on Voluntary Sustainability Standards The data in this chapter are drawn from an original dataset of VSS literature coded on a number of unique variables. That dataset encompasses 117 peer-​reviewed journal articles published between 1999 and 2020 that compares two or more third-​party environmental standards against each other. Articles in the dataset come from journals in anthropology, biology, business/​management, economics, political science, and public policy, and interdisciplinary journals. A number of scope conditions apply to the dataset. First, the dataset includes only articles that compare two or more VSS. It excludes articles that focus on a sole standard and theoretical or conceptual work that mentions multiple environmental standards but does not compare them explicitly. The dataset also excludes research focused exclusively on meta-​ governance (e.g., the ISEAL Alliance, a best practice disseminator for standard setters), comparisons of in-​house standards (e.g., Starbucks CAFE Practices, an in-​house code of conduct for Starbucks’ suppliers), and comparisons of mandatory national environmental regulation (e.g., the Lacey Act, a law banning trade in illegal wildlife and forest products). It also excludes research published in sector-​specific journals (e.g., The International Forestry Review) since these might bias the findings on sectoral focus.

400    Hamish van der Ven Each of the 117 articles in the dataset is coded across six variables. The first (discipline) refers to the disciplinary focus of the journal in which the article is published. If the journal makes explicit reference to being interdisciplinary in the overview section of its web page, then it is coded as such. The second (method) distinguishes between articles that use either qualitative or quantitative methods. Coding decisions on this variable are based on the primary method at work in an article. An article that draws its primary insights from a large-​N survey would be coded as “quantitative” whereas one that compares two cases in depth would be coded as “qualitative.” Where both methods are used in relative balance, an observation is coded as “mixed/​multiple.” The third (sector) identifies the commercial sectors that are the subject of comparative research (e.g., forests, fish, coffee, soy). Each article can be coded across multiple sectors (e.g., forestry and fisheries). In cases where an article mentions more than 10 commercial sectors—​as in the large-​N examples of cross-​sectoral comparison—​the article is coded as “mixed-​multiple.” The fourth (certification) identifies the specific sustainability standards that are the focus of comparison in each article (e.g., FSC, MSC). Each article can be coded across multiple certifications (e.g., FSC and MSC). The fifth (region) delineates whether the geographic focus of an article entails OECD or non-​OECD countries or both. The final variable (basis for comparison) codes what is actually being compared. Or, put differently, the dependent variable of interest. Here I identify eight different types of comparisons. “Consumer behavior” applies to articles that examine how different labels shape consumer preferences and willingness to pay for sustainability. “Standard design/​governance” applies to articles that compare standards on the basis of how they are designed or managed. “Economic impacts” applies to articles that compare standards on their ability to generate price premiums for certified organizations or improve the financial performance of the firms that use them. “Environmental impacts” applies to articles that compare environmental performance across any environmental criteria. “Interaction with government” applies to articles that compare and contrast government reactions to different sustainability standards, thereby adding a more conventional approach to comparative politics to their research. “Legitimacy and authority” applies to articles that compare the different sites of authority and legitimation strategies that sustainability standards use with their stakeholders. “Uptake” refers to articles that compare standards on their market uptake or firm willingness to comply. Finally, “mixed-​multiple” is a residual category for articles that compare standards across more than one of these dimensions. All data were hand-​coded by the author and one research assistant in Excel. The charts were also produced in Excel.

Blind Spots and Biases in Comparisons of Voluntary Sustainability Standards Disciplinary Focus As Figure 21.1 indicates, the research on comparative transnational environmental governance is strongly interdisciplinary, at least in terms of where it is being published. Nearly 60% of the articles included in the database were published in interdisciplinary journals

Comparing Voluntary Sustainability Standards     401 like Regulation & Governance, Ecological Economics, Journal of Cleaner Production, Agriculture and Human Values, and Global Environmental Change. On one hand, this has positive implications for research and practice on transnational environmental governance. It suggests that academics are engaging, to some extent, with scholars from outside their primary field of expertise. If one views theoretical pluralism as a net benefit to any field of research, then it follows that interdisciplinarity strengthens knowledge within this field. However, the sharply tapering pyramid structure of Figure 21.1 also gestures to a paucity of comparative transnational environmental governance research in mainstream political science and public policy journals. Within political science, the database includes a scant four comparisons of VSS schemes in well-​established political science journals. There are two articles each in Politics & Society and The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, ranked 41st and 61st (respectively) out of all political science journals based on 2-​year impact factor. There are no hits whatsoever in top-​ranked comparative politics journals like Comparative Political Studies, Western European Politics, European Union Politics, or Journal of European Public Policy. There is moderately more coverage in public policy and administration journals, with four articles in Public Administration and one in Governance, both of which are top-​5 journals according to their Google Scholar h5 index. All the same, the statistics point to a worrisome trend: political scientists and public policy scholars who work on comparative VSS are publishing their work outside of their own disciplinary journals. The question is why? There are a number of relatively benign answers to this question and some that are more political. It might be the case that VSS scholars are simply trying to get their work out to a broader audience. Publishing in an interdisciplinary journal is an ideal strategy to do so, especially since many of the aforementioned interdisciplinary journals have higher impact factors than the top political science journals. Conversely, it may be the case that the absence of comparative VSS research is symptomatic of the broader relegation of transnational governance and environmental politics within political science (Green and Hale 2017; Javeline 2014; Keohane 2015). In the case of comparative VSS research, the topic is

Interdisciplinary

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Figure 21.1  Comparative voluntary sustainability standards research by disciplinary focus.

402    Hamish van der Ven even absent from Global Environmental Politics, arguably the flagship journal of political scientists who study the environment. One potential explanation for this concerns state-​centrism in political science. There remains some tendency in the discipline toward considering states and subnational governments as the only objects worthy of analysis. This perspective is at odds with the growing role of non-​state actors in authoritatively steering behavior across a number of issue areas. (Büthe and Mattli 2011) The environmental impacts of coffee production are an example. According to recent estimates, at least a quarter of global coffee production is governed by a VSS (Willer et al. 2019). The rules inherent in these voluntary standards will arguably have more of an environmental impact than the global sum of domestic agricultural regulations or international agreements relevant to coffee (DeFries et al. 2017). Hence, one could argue that transnational environmental governance, of the type represented by VSS, belongs firmly in the center of the discipline based on its reach and impact alone. Yet, because political science remains primarily focused on states, it remains largely outside of it. For this reason, political scientists who work on VSS and other forms of transnational governance are publishing their work outside flagship disciplinary journals and in venues like Regulation & Governance or Global Environmental Change.

Methodological Focus Figure 21.2 shows the breakdown of VSS research by methodological approach. As the pie chart illustrates, the field skews toward qualitative research with a dearth of mixed-​ method approaches.2 Of the 117 articles included in the comparative VSS dataset, only one employs both quantitative and qualitative methods concurrently (van der Ven, Rothacker, and Cashore 2018). A closer look at the data reveals a disparity in which types of methods are used to answer certain research questions. Of the 45 primarily quantitative articles in the dataset, 16 are focused on consumer behavior and 10 are focused on economic impacts. These articles—​published mainly in business and economics journals—​use survey methods and experiments to gauge when consumers will buy eco-​labeled products or when businesses will partner with voluntary standard setters (Espinoza, Buehlmann, and Smith 2012; Loureiro and Lotade 2005). A focus on environmental impacts is conspicuously absent from the quantitative research on VSS. Only two quantitative articles used larger datasets to examine environmental impacts, and these are both cross-​sectional in nature (Furumo et al. 2020; Melo and Wolf 2005). Hence, there appears to be a need for more quantitative research on environmental impacts generally as well as longitudinal analyses that can illuminate how VSS changes environmental behaviors overtime. The qualitative articles in this field have made numerous contributions to the broader understanding of the nature and potential of VSS. Nonetheless, the widespread usage of small-​ N comparative case studies raises some questions about the external validity of findings to date. This is especially true given the disproportionate focus on a handful of sectors, regions, and certifications. As I discuss in the following sections, there is an abundance of research on VSS for forests, coffee, seafood, and organics. The most common methodological approach in the VSS literature is a comparison between two voluntary sustainability standards within one of these sectors, for example FSC and SFI forests (Auld and Bull 2003) or Fairtrade and Rainforest Alliance coffee (Raynolds, Murray, and Heller 2007).

Comparing Voluntary Sustainability Standards     403 Mixed/Multiple 1%

Quantitative 38%

Qualitative 61%

Figure 21.2  Comparative voluntary sustainability standards research by methodological orientation.

The problem with this paired comparison approach is that it may lead to erroneous inferences about the broader nature of VSS by generalizing sector-​specific dynamics. For example, much of the research on forestry has focused on “racing-​to-​the-​bottom” dynamics as competing standards reduce their stringency in a bid to win broader market share (Tollefson, Gale, and Haley 2009). However, other research has suggested that this relationship does not hold when tested across multiple commercial sectors (van der Ven 2019). The problem with drawing lessons from coffee, forests, and seafood is that these are the sectors in which VSS has been around the longest. It is reasonable to assume that emergent VSS in other sectors will have absorbed some of the lessons of older schemes, and therefore might be characterized by different dynamics. Here then, is where further large-​N or medium-​N research could add value to this research agenda: by probing the external validity of sector-​ specific hypotheses across broader “resonance groups” of similar cases in different sectors (Steinberg 2015). The type of medium-​N fuzzy-​set qualitative analysis employed in van der Heijden’s article (2015) is a good example of one promising approach for future research. There are genuine obstacles to expanding the usage of quantitative methods in this field, especially to assess environmental impacts from VSS. For one, there is a well-​established lack of empirical data (van der Ven and Cashore 2018). Outside of the biggest VSS, monitoring and evaluation exercises remain scarce primarily because they are expensive and time-​ consuming. Some scholars have also pointed out that there are institutional barriers to accessing data. Lobbyists for voluntary standards and umbrella groups like ISEAL have been criticized for erecting barriers to any data that may cast VSS in a less-​than-​flattering light (Sun et al. 2020). Furthermore, it can be difficult to conduct large-​N research when the independent and dependent variables of interest are constantly in flux. Sustainability standards themselves are regularly reviewed and changed. This makes the effect of a given standard on any dependent variable different between T-​0 and T-​1 (Auld 2014; Renckens

404    Hamish van der Ven and Auld 2019). Hence, there is a need to guard against ahistorical research that ignores contingency and causality across time. Here again, a greater reliance on mixed-​method research might offer the best means of addressing external validity concerns while also addressing the effects of timing and sequence.

Sectoral and Certification Focus Figure 21.3 displays the sectoral focus of each article in the comparative VSS dataset. Forestry is the most commonly studied sector, representing 16% of all articles, followed closely by coffee, fish, and organics at 10–​11% each. Cumulatively, these sectors make up just under half of the comparative VSS research captured in this dataset. Figure 21.4 adds further evidence that there is a sectoral imbalance by tracking the specific sustainability standards that are most frequently mentioned in these articles. The FSC stands out as the number one object of research, with nearly twice as many mentions as the second most-​studied standard, the MSC. In total, 4 of the top 10 most-​studied sustainability standards are forestry-​specific (FSC, SFI, PEFC, CSA). ISO 14001 sneaks into the top four by virtue of its strong presence in economics and management journals. The key takeaway from these two figures is that scholars invest a lot of time and energy into understanding the biggest certification schemes in forestry, coffee, and organics while other sectors/​certifications receive far less attention. It is worth reiterating here that these figures should be taken with a grain of salt since they do not include books or articles that examine a single sustainability standard. Nor do they include research on other forms of transnational environmental governance, like carbon

Forests 16%

Cocoa 2% Cotton 2% Palm oil 4%

Coffee 11%

Buildings 4%

Textiles 6%

Management practices 6% Mixed/multiple 6%

Organics 11%

Produce 6%

Fish 10%

Figure 21.3  Comparative voluntary sustainability standards research by sectoral focus.

Comparing Voluntary Sustainability Standards     405 FSC MSC Rainforest Alliance ISO 14001 SFI PEFC UTZ RSPO CSA EU Ecolabel 0

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Figure 21.4 Comparative voluntary sustainability standards research by sustainability standard focus. markets (Bulkeley et al. 2014). Hence, one must proceed cautiously in inferring broader trends in transnational environmental governance more generally. Nonetheless, two questions flow from this data: Why is there a sectoral imbalance, and why does it matter? The first question is perhaps easier to answer. Much of the focus on forestry, coffee, and fisheries is due to the longer history of VSS and VSS scholarship in these sectors. Quite simply, these sectors are studied more because they have been around the longest. Their longevity has given way to intrasectoral competition between VSS and made them prime candidates for comparative research. The FSC is one of the oldest sustainability standards, having been formed in 1993. It was followed by the first Rainforest Alliance certified coffee in 1995 and the MSC in 1996. Both schemes were the subject of seminal books that set the research agenda for a community of VSS scholars (Cashore, Newsom, and Auld 2004; Gulbrandsen 2010). By contrast, the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO; one of the primary sustainability standards for palm oil) was not formed until 2004, and the Roundtable on Sustainable Soy (RTRS) did not form until 2006. The Global Roundtable for Sustainable Beef was not registered as a nonprofit until 2012 and has yet to launch a standard for sustainable beef. The depth of history for VSS in forestry, coffee, and organics means that sustainability standards in these sectors have entrenched themselves into markets and made themselves more visible to businesses and consumers, thereby increasing the likelihood that they will attract the interest of scholars. Having established themselves as objects of interest in the emergent domain of VSS research, a certain amount of path dependence explains their continued salience. The availability of longitudinal data and the potential to respond to other scholars working in the same empirical area can explain why they remain an object of interest to this day (Judge-​Lord, McDermott, and Cashore 2020). Research on VSS for forests, fisheries, coffee, and organics has yielded some important insights. Researchers have documented racing-​ to-​ the-​ bottom dynamics between competing forestry schemes (Gulbrandsen 2005), an inverse relationship between uptake and stringency among fisheries schemes (Kalfagianni and Pattberg 2013), and increasing collaboration and cooptation of VSS by public regulatory authorities (Arcuri 2015; Gale and

406    Hamish van der Ven Haward 2011). All of these insights have contributed to a better understanding of how VSS work and interact with other political actors. With this said, there are a number of reasons why the sectoral imbalance in VSS research is a cause for concern. First, if a central goal of the comparative VSS research agenda is to understand when VSS will achieve positive environmental benefits, then it would make sense to focus on sectors that have a significant impact on important environmental indicators. Forestry and coffee are important, but they are by no means the sectors that contribute the most to environmental degradation, regardless of which dimension of degradation one measures. Consider greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, for example. The FAO estimates that 14.5% of global GHG emissions (roughly 7.1 gigatons per year) is caused by livestock farming (Steinfeld et al. 2006). By contrast, the entire global forest products value chain accounts for just 0.89 gigatons per year, less than one-​seventh of the total footprint of livestock measured at the same time (Miner 2010). While climate change is by no means the only environmental challenge that merits attention, it does raise important questions about why VSS in a particularly consequential sector remains critically understudied. In addition to empirical concerns, theoretical concerns also arise when focusing on some sectors instead of others. As observed in the preceding section, scholars tend to generalize about the broader condition of VSS based on research into forestry, coffee, and fisheries. This is problematic because different sectors have different sectoral dynamics that may lead to VSS behaviors unique to that sector. For example, some sectors may be less consumer-​ facing (e.g., shipping), thereby reducing the visibility of associated environmental issues and the amount of consumer scrutiny directed at VSS (Poulsen, Ponte, and Lister 2016). In these cases, VSS may be less stringent because it is able to “fly under the radar” of consumer and media scrutiny (van der Ven 2019). All of which is to say that VSS for things you put in your body (i.e., seafood or coffee) are not necessarily representative of VSS in other, less consumer-​facing sectors. Hence, the comparative VSS literature has significant issues with sample bias and, for this reason, raises concerns about the external validity of findings that are specific to the more commonly studied sectors. The same concerns about external validity extend to the disproportionate focus of the VSS literature on larger and more established sustainability standards (i.e., FSC, MSC, and Rainforest Alliance). As I have observed elsewhere, larger sustainability standards are subject to entirely different pressures and incentives than their smaller counterparts (van der Ven 2019). Namely, the bigger the standard-​setter, the more likely it is to face critical scrutiny and require legitimacy from a broad audience of stakeholders. Take the MSC, for example. Inasmuch as the MSC seeks to be the global standard for sustainable capture fisheries, it faces different levels of public scrutiny and different legitimacy requirements than, for example, the smaller Naturland program for fisheries. This disparity in scale and audience has implications for everything from standard design, to governance, to environmental impact. Thus, by focusing primarily on large, well-​established sustainability standards, the comparative VSS literature offers a weak theoretical foundation for understanding smaller or nascent initiatives that may be particularly salient within a particular sector or region. Last, and related to the preceding arguments, there is a problem related to the independence of VSS as an object of research. If part of the goal of studying certain sectors and standards is to derive general lessons that travel to other sectors, then one must make certain assumptions about sectoral relationships and dynamics. One of these assumptions is independence or, put differently, the idea that what happens in VSS for palm oil is not

Comparing Voluntary Sustainability Standards     407 systematically related to what happens in VSS for coffee. If a study of the governance structure of UTZ coffee is intended to be relevant to RSPO palm oil, then we assume that the two standards are starting in relatively similar positions. Of course, in practice we know that this is not the case. More recent sustainability standards learn from the successes and failures of their predecessors as fields mature over time (Dingwerth and Pattberg 2009). Hence, it is problematic to draw lessons primarily from the oldest sustainability standards in the field since newly emerged standards face fundamentally different initial conditions.

Regional Focus Figure 21.5 visualizes the regional focus of articles in the comparative VSS dataset, dividing them into articles that focus exclusively on OECD member countries, non-​OECD countries, or both. The figure suggests a modest regional imbalance in research focus: 43% of articles are focused exclusively on OECD countries compared to only 30% on non-​ OECD countries. The fact that the majority of comparisons are between standards in the industrialized world is consistent with a number of other trends observed in this chapter so far. For example, this result is consistent with a heavy sectoral focus on forestry, fisheries, and organics, all of which have scaled primarily in the industrialized world but have failed to gain as much traction in the Global South (Willer et al. 2019). As observed in the previous section, there is a bias toward studying VSS that have been around longer and have a greater amount of available data. The tendency toward regional bias also reflects a broader trend in the practice of VSS. Namely, most VSS are created and managed by groups headquartered in OECD countries (e.g., the Rainforest Alliance is headquartered in New York) but target behavioral change for producers located in non-​OECD countries (Sampson et al. 2015; Sun and van der Ven 2020). Firms and producers in the Global South are essential to the success of VSS, yet they

Both 27%

OECD 43%

Non-OECD 30%

Figure 21.5  Comparative voluntary sustainability standards research by regional focus.

408    Hamish van der Ven are a seldom-​studied group of stakeholders. As the following section suggests, comparative VSS scholars are far more likely to compare standards on their design/​governance, impacts on consumer behavior, or legitimacy/​authority than their social or environmental impacts. Here again, this imbalance presents both empirical and theoretical concerns. Empirically, it is worrisome that less than a third of research in this sample focuses exclusively on the primary sites of environmental degradation in the Global South. Theoretically, sample bias and external validity concerns exist related to theory-​building on the basis of data drawn primarily from experiences in the industrialized world, particularly since a growing number of voluntary standards originate in non-​OECD countries. These standards tend to look very different from their OECD counterparts. They are focused more heavily on capacity building through knowledge-​sharing as opposed to setting rigid standards that are audited for compliance (Starobin 2021; Sun and van der Ven 2020). In many cases, these “homegrown” sustainability standards (e.g., Viet GAP, the Hainan Tilapia Sustainability Alliance) originated as a direct response to the perceived failings of comparable sustainability standards developed in the OECD. Given that these homegrown standards look very different from their OECD-​based predecessors and that rising South-​South trade will potentially expand their scale in the coming years (Bloomfield 2020), it is worrisome that the comparative VSS research agenda remains primarily focused on the Global North.

Basis for Comparison Comparisons of VSS are limited in what is being compared, with some aspects of standard systems receiving far more scholarly attention than others. Figure 21.6 illustrates what exactly is being compared in VSS research that contrasts two or more standards. By far the largest dimension of comparison is the differences in the design and governance of sustainability standards. In total, 33 of the 117 articles in the dataset are focused on comparisons between how sustainability standards are created and managed. This includes topics like the extent of convergence between schemes (Howlett and Rayner 2006), the effects of competition on the prescriptiveness of standards (Judge-​Lord, McDermott, and Cashore 2020), bias toward particular stakeholders resulting from design or governance characteristics (Bennett 2017; Steelman and Jorge 2005), and the relationship between standard design and credibility (Partzsch, Zander, and Robinson 2019; van der Ven 2015). Articles that focus on consumer behavior, uptake, and mixed/​multiple comparisons (the residual category for general comparative work) are somewhat less frequent. The number of articles on consumer behavior is buoyed by a significant body of research in economics and business journals that examines consumer recognition and willingness to pay for particular sustainability standards (Johnston and Roheim 2006; Loureiro and Lotade 2005). The same could be said for the “uptake” category; this figure is high because of numerous studies that seek to understand why some firms seek certification and which standards they’re likely to choose to support their bottom line (Moeltner and van Kooten 2003; Prado and Woodside 2015). In the lower half of the chart we find articles that compare standards on their legitimacy and authority or examine their economic impacts. Legitimacy and authority are common topics in the broader VSS research agenda since standards are both voluntary and primarily initiated by non-​state actors. This makes them interesting subjects for scholars interested in

Comparing Voluntary Sustainability Standards     409 the origins and sites of political authority more generally (Bernstein 2011). The comparative research on this theme seeks to understand the origins of political authority and why some standards are viewed as legitimate while others are not (Cashore 2002; Miller and Bush 2015). The research on economic impacts is dominated by studies that focus on whether businesses benefit from using VSS (Bouslah et al. 2010; Eichholtz, Kok, and Quigley 2010). A smaller group of articles attempts to determine whether producers get a price premium for certified products (Bacon 2005; Beuchelt and Zeller 2011; Minten et al. 2018). Figure 21.5 illustrates a surprisingly low number of articles that compare standards on the basis of their interactions with governments. Only a handful of articles in this sample compare VSS based on how they are shaped by domestic political institutions (Verbruggen 2013), whether they collaborate or conflict with domestic political authorities (Macdonald 2020), or when and how they are coopted into public regulation (Arcuri 2015). Put more simply, there is a dearth of comparative politics in the literature on interstandard comparisons. This is unfortunate given findings from single-​standard research that suggest that domestic political institutions play an enormous role in shaping the configuration, implementation, and efficacy of VSS in a given country. For example, we know that FSC standards are very different in Russia than they are in Canada (Tysiachniouk and McDermott 2016). There is a missed opportunity in extant research to consider how domestic politics shape all schemes operating in a given country or how comparative politics can provide useful insights into why some VSS achieve better economic or environmental results than others. Last, the most revealing finding of this analysis is the dearth of comparative VSS research that examines environmental impacts. Arguably, one of the most important questions that this field must wrestle with is when and how VSS can actually achieve positive environmental impacts. Yet, as Figure 21.6 shows, only 3 of the 117 articles in the dataset compare sustainability standards on the basis of their environmental impact.3 Here again, one must ask why this lacuna exists.

Standard design/governance Consumer behaviour Mixed/multiple Uptake Legitimacy/authority Economic impacts Interaction with government Environmental impacts 0

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Figure 21.6  Comparative VSS research by basis for comparison.

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410    Hamish van der Ven Two hypotheses immediately come to mind. First, much of the reason for this omission could be attributed to the difficulties in establishing causality between sustainability standards and environmental outcomes (van der Ven and Cashore 2018). Environmental outcomes have a tendency to be overdetermined. Many different variables may cause a particular environmental outcome, with sustainability standards being just one. For this reason, there has been a tendency to “black box” environmental outcomes or infer them through standard design or governance characteristics. Only recently have articles emerged that look at environmental indicators like deforestation rates or pollution from synthetic fertilizers (Furumo et al. 2020; Grabs 2020; van der Ven et al. 2018).4 Much of this delay can be attributed to the scarcity of reliable data on both rates of sustainable certification and associated environmental impacts. Second, there may be more political reasons for the lack of research on environmental impacts. Obtaining data is costly, time-​intensive, and requires significant resources. Much of the private funding for impacts research comes from sustainability standard-​setters themselves (e.g., Fairtrade) who—​anecdotal evidence suggests—​issue requests for proposals (RFPs) for research on economic impacts far more frequently than environmental impacts. Part of the reason for this may be due to the fact that standard setters use research to improve uptake of their standards. To this end, proving that a standard results in a price premium for producers is a far more effective marketing technique than proving its environmental impacts if one assumes that producers primarily use sustainability standards to improve their own bottom line. If comparative VSS scholars are simply following the money, then the lack of resources for environmental impacts research may explain the scarcity of scholarly output on this theme. Third, and related to the preceding point, it may be the case that environmental outcomes from VSS are underwhelming enough to be unworthy of publication. A comparison of two standards where neither generates a discernible environmental outcome is unlikely to attract the attention of top journals. Moreover, if much of the research into environmental impacts is being funded by sustainability standard-​setters themselves (e.g., Fairtrade), then it stands to reason that these funders may only want to support research that casts them in a favorable light. A key implication of the lack of environmental impacts research is that the entire enterprise of private voluntary certifications remains hypothetical and its continued existence far from certain. Indeed, some scholars in the field went so far as to organize a panel at the 2021 meeting of the International Studies Association entitled “Is Private Governance Mythical?” Absent some proof that VSS can actually achieve its stated governance objectives, there remains little justification for maintaining the continued attention of such a sizeable academic community.

Conclusion Research into VSS has progressed from nascent to fully developed over the past 20 years. It now encompasses scholars at all levels of seniority and has deep ties to the practitioner community. Comparisons between voluntary sustainability standards play a central role in this research agenda by explaining how interventions differ and why. Notwithstanding the progress in the field, a number of blind spots and biases remain that inhibit a better understanding of the role of VSS in addressing global environmental challenges.

Comparing Voluntary Sustainability Standards     411 This chapter empirically documents these biases and blind spots with the help of new data on trends and patterns in journal articles comparing two or more sustainability standards. It finds that comparative VSS research is characterized by an inattention to environmental impacts and tends to focus more energy on certain sectors, standards, and regions. The remainder of this conclusion considers what practical lessons these findings hold for the future of comparative VSS research. First, the data suggested a strong tendency toward publishing comparative VSS research in interdisciplinary journals. At the very least, this suggests that comparative VSS scholarship is being read and critiqued by scholars from multiple disciplines, all of whom may see different strengths and weaknesses in particular approaches. Despite the merits of multidisciplinarity, there may still be value in pushing VSS research back into the mainstream of political science. This is particularly important in light of the growing role that private authorities play in creating rules that structure social and economic activity (Büthe and Mattli 2011). To this end, comparative VSS scholars should continue to present their research at general political science conferences, serve on editorial boards for political science journals, and submit their work to outlets like Comparative Politics and International Organization by way of moving from the fringe to the mainstream of the discipline. Second, the findings about research methods suggest an opportunity to move toward greater usage of mixed-​method research designs. Two promising strategies to increase both internal and external validity have been described at length elsewhere. The first entails establishing correlations through large-​N statistical methods and then exploring causal mechanisms using case-​specific process tracing (van der Ven and Cashore 2018). The second involves developing hypotheses through qualitative research and then testing their external validity by developing “resonance groups,” or, categories of processes that share many characteristics in common across borders (Steinberg 2015). The resonance group approach inverts the conventional order in which case selection occurs by delving into empirics first and considering external validity second. Third, the prevalence of research on specific sectors and standards suggests an urgent need to diversify the empirical focus of comparative VSS research. Put more plainly, VSS research needs to move away from the “usual suspects”—​forestry, fisheries, coffee, and organics—​and direct renewed attention to other sectors that cause massive environmental degradation. At a minimum, this includes a greater attention to animal agriculture, soy, and palm oil (depending on the environmental attribute of interest). Diversifying sectoral focus offers the opportunity to study VSS that have emerged in the last 5–​10 years and explore whether established hypotheses travel to different sectors. Fourth, regional focus should include a greater emphasis on the design and implementation of VSS in non-​OECD countries. As noted elsewhere, VSS that originates in the Global South tends to look very different from VSS that originates in North America, Oceania, or Europe (Starobin 2021; Sun and van der Ven 2020). It is not at all apparent that theories developed in relation to OECD-​based interventions will apply in non-​OECD contexts. Moreover, as trade between low-​and middle-​income countries increases, VSS schemes developed for audiences outside the industrialized world may play an increasing role in governing production practices. Thus, the analytical lens of comparative VSS scholarship must shift to the Global South for both theoretical and empirical reasons. Fifth, the findings on the basis of comparison variable suggest that further attention should be paid to how VSS interact with governments. Existing research on transnational

412    Hamish van der Ven governance more broadly has established that domestic political institutions are important for the configuration and implementation of non-​state, market-​driven interventions (Knudsen and Moon 2017; Renckens 2020). The ability of VSS to secure the buy-​in of local stakeholders and achieve discernible environmental results depends on the support of the state apparatus. In other words, comparative politics matters for VSS. In light of this, future research must pay closer attention to the interaction of public and private regulatory authority (Cashore et al. 2021). Within the narrower domain of interstandard comparisons, it is important that scholars understand when VSS are likely to conflict, coordinate, or coexist alongside domestic political authorities. Investigating the experiences of different standards within the same country is one means of building hypotheses in this area. Sixth, and finally, the comparative VSS research agenda needs to devote more attention to environmental impacts. The rationale for doing so is quite simple: neither research nor practice on VSS can survive without demonstrating that there is some outcome potential in the use of voluntary, market-​based environmental governance. Absent this potential, there are fewer reasons for stakeholders to support VSS and fewer still to research it. To this end, the launching of evidensia.eco as a clearinghouse for impacts research is a promising development. However, much of the impacts research on the site remains focused on a single standard in a single locale. A deeper engagement with comparative methods is vital to gaining an understanding of which approaches work and which do not, particularly outside of particular contexts and sectors.

Acknowledgment I would like to thank my research assistant, Samantha Hamilton, for her help in writing this chapter.

Notes 1. While the focus of this chapter is on peer-​reviewed articles, it is worth noting a number of books have been written on comparative VSS as well (Auld 2014; Bullock 2017; Cashore, Newsom, and Auld 2004; Fransen 2011; Grabs 2020; Gulbrandsen 2010; van der Ven 2019). 2. There is some selection bias against mixed-​method research since the dataset includes only journal articles and not books. 3. A handful of studies examine both economic and environmental impacts and are coded as “mixed multiple” (Blackman and Rivera 2011; Philpott et al. 2007; Vanderhaegen et al. 2018). 4. Research on sustainable forestry certification is somewhat more advanced on this theme but remains focused on the handful of established forestry standards.

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Chapter 22

C ontinuit y a nd C ha ng e in Carb on Ma rk et P oliti c s Carley Chavara, Christian Elliott, Matthew Hoffmann, and Matthew Paterson Introduction Carbon markets1 have experienced multiple highs and lows throughout the evolution of the global response to climate change. Adapted from a novel way to address air pollution in North America, a market-​based mechanism to price carbon pollution was first included in efforts to combat climate change in the Kyoto Protocol (KP) (Paterson et al. 2014; for the longer history of the concept and how it has spread, see Gorman and Solomon 2002; Lane 2012). Not without controversy, critics of carbon markets have raised opposition on the grounds of “climate fraud and carbon colonialism” (Bachram 2004; also see, Böhm and Dabhi 2009; Paterson 2010). Despite stalled multilateral climate governance post-​Kyoto, key markets did emerge in the European Union, subnational units in North America, and more recently in South Korea and China. Individual carbon markets themselves ebbed and flowed with politics, market dynamics, and ongoing debates over not only the details of cap-​and-​trade systems, but also the relative merits of carbon markets compared to carbon taxes. Though the Paris Agreement (PA) revitalized global climate politics, it also complicated the development of carbon markets as multilateral climate governance has shifted from a strictly collective endeavor into loosely coordinated national responses. Throughout all of this, those economists in favor of market mechanisms steadily maintain that a fully global carbon market remains perhaps the most efficient (if not optimal) policy, even if they recognize this may not be possible to achieve (e.g., Newell et al. 2014). This chapter seeks to make sense of the current politics and future prospects for carbon markets moving forward. We begin by assessing the ramifications of the Kyoto

418    Carley Chavara et al. to Paris transition in climate governance, which makes a single global carbon market unlikely in large measure because of the institutional and political variation across countries—the same variation that made global cooperation on the Kyoto model difficult to sustain. The pursuit of linkage2 between carbon markets has thus become an important “second best” solution for proponents. But linkage faces obstacles from the same sorts of institutional and political variation, and grasping the mechanics of this climate policy tool requires exploring the evolution of national carbon market politics. The bulk of the chapter turns to a comparative discussion of the latest developments in five key jurisdictions: the EU, China, Canada, South Korea, and Indonesia. We focus on the specific question of linkage in the design of these markets because it expresses well how patterns of national variation interrelate and condition the prospects for a global market. We conclude with thoughts on where carbon markets may be heading and how the field of comparative environmental politics should best approach the study of the “global” carbon market.

Carbon Markets in Decentralized Multilateral Institutions The innovation of the PA was institutionalizing decentralization. Signatories committed to develop nationally determined contributions (NDCs) within the context of the Agreement’s overarching goals. International climate politics now, by design, is driven by the domestic institutions and distributional conflicts that define the unique commitments of different states, with major ramifications for the evolution of carbon markets. Unlike the KP, carbon markets receive faint incorporation in the central Articles of the PA. Interest was signaled in emissions trading through Article 6.2 and 6.4, creating space for “internationally transferred mitigation outcomes” and a related international mechanism supporting sustainable development, though tangible specifics continue to be debated. At the same time, nearly half of countries made some reference to carbon trading in their NDCs submitted under Article 4 (Wettestad and Gulbrandsen 2017). For true believers in the prospects for cap-​and-​trade to minimize abatement costs for firms, the lack of an explicit or unified effort toward a global carbon market may have appeared to entrench existing setbacks. The World Bank estimated that an international carbon market would reduce the costs of meeting NDCs by 32% between 2020 and 2030, or by US$115 billion per year across countries (World Bank, Ecofys, and Vivid Economics 2016). Other observers, however, found the new environment more fruitful given the realities of global discord: an incremental approach starting with climate clubs or coalitions of the willing could be a feasible path to a realized international carbon market (Rose et al. 2018). Where the efficiency of international cap-​and-​trade depended on consistency in the quality of allowances or offsets and the universal capacity to create and enforce property rights, a combination of “bottom-​up” and “top-​down” approaches could mitigate risks of carbon leakage and produce less friction in domestic political economies through incremental experimentation and successive linkages (Green, Sterner, and Wagner 2014).3

Continuity and Change in Carbon Market Politics    419

The Only Hope for a Global Market? Linking Domestic Carbon Markets Without a centralized global carbon market, linkage of existing national and subnational markets is seen as a second-​best pathway in the near term by some (Ranson and Stavins 2016; Doda et al. 2019; Mehling, Metcalf, and Stavins 2018; Dellink et al. 2014). Incremental linking offers a pragmatic compromise between political feasibility and the efficiency gains from cross-​regional trading, compared to launching a global carbon market from scratch. However, successful linkage depends on the similarity of existing markets in terms of accounting units, sector and gas coverages, levels of policy ambition, and offset rules (Ranson and Stavins 2016). In contrast, as carbon market experiments proliferated across countries, they have tended to diverge over these design issues, both because lessons (mostly negative ones) have been learned from the challenges experienced by frontrunners like the European Union and because of how local rules are shaped by unique domestic political economies and institutional structures (Gulbrandsen et al. 2019; Betsill and Hoffmann 2011). The very process by which new carbon markets emerge aggravates the challenge of ultimately standardizing and linking them. As such, in the past 20 years, formalized linkages have been rare. The EU ETS twice added new linkages—​first the European Free Trade Area countries of Norway, Lichtenstein, and Iceland in Phase II of the EU ETS in 2009, and, in 2019, linking with Switzerland after 10 years of negotiation (World Bank 2020). Geographical proximity, shared regional institutions, and economic cooperation, as well as the European Union’s predominant position within these relationships, all contributed to successful linkage. At the same time, the European Union is also in the process of de-​linking with the exit of the United Kingdom from the European Union (also see Tobin and Wylie, in this volume). Potential linkages between the EU ETS and both California and Australia were considered—​the former failing due to concerns over price uncertainty (Zetterberg 2012) and the latter due to the repeal of the Australian ETS in 2014. Among North American subnational carbon markets, 4 years of negotiation yielded the California-​Quebec-​Ontario ETS linkage in 2018, although Ontario delinked later that year after revoking its cap-​and-​trade regulations (California Air Resources Board 2020; Wright 2018). In these instances of delinking (with the exception of the United Kingdom), endemic politicization of climate policy in combination with shifts in domestic political control led to policy reversal (Raymond 2020; Pearse 2017; Millar et al. 2020). The relative rarity of successful linkages indicates the extensive compatibility required. Beyond design elements, linking carbon markets demands harmonization of climate ambition4 and stringency of measuring, reporting, and verification (MRV) to prevent carbon leakage and maintain market integrity (Cullenward 2015; Green et al. 2014; Schneider and La Hoz Theuer 2019). Furthermore, harmonizing policies is complicated by the political costs associated with the loss of policy autonomy. That loss can involve compromising on rules, as with Australia’s attempted link with the European Union resulting in accepting conditions like eliminating a planned price floor and reducing domestic use of clean development mechanism (CDM) offsets (Evans and Wu 2019). It can also mean accepting the risks of delegating control over market price and quantity to foreign administrators such that interventions to protect domestic industries are limited (Habla and Winkler 2018).

420    Carley Chavara et al. In North America for example, linking has increased price volatility in jurisdictions like Quebec and California, whereby unilateral decisions about price or allowances in one jurisdiction generated unintended consequences throughout the system (Burtraw et al. 2013; Green 2017; Mehling et al. 2018). Given the obstacles, it seems puzzling why jurisdictions have a “stated preference” (Ranson and Stavins 2016) to link carbon markets at all. Yet they do. Any hope of achieving the benefits of linkage envisioned by proponents depends on recognizing how persistent institutional variation has the potential to undermine linkage and grasping how individual markets are evolving.

Ongoing Experimentation with National Carbon Markets Defying skeptical expectations (e.g., Reyes 2011; Lane and Stephan 2015), the past decade has seen continued experimentation with carbon markets in a number of national contexts. We analyze five carbon markets (European Union, China, Canada, Korea, and Indonesia) to examine how varied institutional contexts and international diffusion/​learning shape areas of convergence and divergence in the cases. In large part, we find that variation in domestic institutions and politics carries the weight of explanation.

The European Union Agreed upon in 2003 and launched in 2005, the EU ETS has evolved substantially from a decentralized system with significant differences in national allocation processes at its start toward a more centralized regional system. This reflects some key institutional features of the European Union as an international organization with significant supranational institutional elements and a normative imperative toward integration. EU carbon market politics has been shaped by competing national preferences, the ambition for market integration, and institutional decision-​making processes at the EU level—notably a relatively high degree of autonomy for the European Commission to propose policy instruments and the voting structure in the European Council, where some types of instruments (taxation, notably, such as a Europe-​wide carbon tax) require unanimity and others (single market regulation, as the EU ETS was framed) can proceed on the basis of qualified majority voting. Recent efforts to reform the EU ETS have been driven, within this institutional context, by combinations of industrial lobbying, differentiated interests around a green transition among member countries, and shifts of political power in critical veto states within the European Union, as well as efforts by the European Commission to use the EU ETS as part of broader goals of European integration. Key to understanding the recent evolution of the EU ETS is realizing how deeply confidence in the system was shook by oversupply of allowances and plunging prices following the financial crisis of 2008 and an influx of CDM credits. The launch of Phase 3 in 2013

Continuity and Change in Carbon Market Politics    421 brought in a single EU cap-​and-​allocation process (21% emissions reduction target relative to 2005 levels), a common linear reduction factor over allowances of 1.74% per year, and the significant expansion of auctioning as an allocation method to replace freely distributed allowances; all measures to address oversupply and low prices (Wettestad and Jevnaker 2017). These measures have since been supplemented with regulatory reforms, notably focused on persistent allowance oversupply. The first reform proposed by the European Commission was “backloading,” or postponing allowance distributions to reduce supply. However, in the wake of the Eurozone crisis, any efforts to place additional costs on energy-​intensive industries were met with resistance in countries like Germany and Poland. The proposal failed to pass in the EU Parliament after its introduction in 2013 (Wettestad 2014). The 2013 German election enabled this impasse to be overcome—​the reform-​skeptical Free Democratic Party was replaced by the Social Democrats as the Christian Democratic Union coalition partner. The European Council and Parliament then had enough support to greenlight the Commission’s effort to carry out backloading in 2014, overriding obstructionist central and eastern European countries (Wettestad and Jevnaker 2016). The constellation of domestic political economies and the progressiveness of governing political parties in European states were therefore critical to the system’s rescue. With a political pathway for further reform, the European Commission turned its attention to creating a more automated mechanism of price management, namely the market stability reserve (MSR). Originally proposed to begin in Stage 4 from 2021 to 2030, the MSR would automatically withdraw allowances above an 833 million threshold, or release allowances into the market if under 400 million. In 2014, a coalition of the Green Growth Group (GGG), including a supportive Germany, managed to push for a fast-​tracked MSR to launch in 2019. To address ongoing problems of low prices, doubling withdrawal rates from 12% to 24% between 2019–​2022 was adopted as well as the decision to cancel allowances that remained in the MSR from year to year, starting in 2024. Key concessions were made to coal-​dependent central and eastern European states through transition financing funds (Wettestad and Jevnaker 2019). The MSR, in combination with concrete signals about the rules of the phase 4 2021–​2030 period caused prices to finally rise from persistently low levels to the €20–​25 per tons of carbon dioxide (tCO2e) range in 2018 and 2019, even holding out resiliently against the economic disruptions of Brexit5 and later COVID-​19, at €17 per tCO2e in the first quarter of 2020 and, at the time of writing (August 2020), around €25 per tCO2e (see Figure 22.1). Internationally, the EU ETS has been a source of EU climate leadership, and Paris created an opportunity to reinforce the legitimacy of European carbon markets and exert pressure on EU climate laggards like Poland (Andresen et al. 2016; Wettestad and Jevnaker 2019). Though at the same time, the oversupply originating from CDM offsets have made for a more cautious European position on integrated markets: the European Union “does not currently envisage continuing the use of international credits for EU ETS compliance after 2020” (European Commission 2020). Rather than being internationally driven, the pace of EU ETS evolution has been predominantly set by competing economic interests, negotiations between countries within the Union, and windows of opportunity for progressive positions on climate created by shifts in national political power.

422    Carley Chavara et al. Data Source: EEX Group Market Data

EUA Price, Euros

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Figure 22.1  EUA spot price, 2014–​2020. Source: Data from EEX Group Market Data

China Though the emergence of carbon markets in China has been described as a diffusion story, its evolution has been largely driven by the complicated multilevel relations between and within the central and regional government bureaucracies. Initially, through bilateral engagement with the European Union and with a successful track record leveraging the CDM, the People’s Republic of China began integrating carbon markets into development planning, starting with its twelfth 5-​year plan (Knox-​Hayes 2016; Stensdal, Heggelund, and Maosheng 2017). Subnational pilot programs were launched in 2014, with highly differentiated designs, ambition levels, allowance distribution rules, and sector coverages—​ all under the auspices of the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) and its regional offices. Stensdal et al. (2017) explain the initial adoption of the ETS through a combination of factors—​positive experiences with the CDM, lobbying from actors in the EU ETS, and internal policy advocacy by the NDRC to higher levels of government, as well as the enabling discursive landscape of President Xi Jinping’s “new normal” approach to economic affairs. An emphasis on market mechanisms as a means for addressing environmental challenges has been a direct actualization of the rhetoric of “ecological civilization”—​a growth-​oriented environmental policy agenda emphasizing the role of markets and finance while translating the tools of Western forerunners into a Chinese political economy (Elliott and Zhang 2019; Wang 2015; Zhang 2019). The pilots served as policy experimentation in the run up to a national market, supported by technical assistance from actors like the Asian Development Bank and the Asia-​Pacific Carbon Market Roundtable (Stensdal et al. 2017). Eight regional pilots were launched in total, each choosing sectoral coverage and allowance issuances based on the local economy and its major emitters. Pilots operated without emissions caps and free allowances initially, but some introduced price floors, expanded sectoral coverage, and allowance auctions over

Continuity and Change in Carbon Market Politics    423 time (World Bank 2020). As they developed, efforts were also made to align policy with the expected national ETS as plans materialized. Despite incremental improvements, the regional pilots often lack the legal muscle to enforce compliance, and survey research and interviews have shown that when firms didn’t comply, deadlines were extended or further allowances were distributed in order to demonstrate good regional performance in national statistics (Deng et al. 2018). Powerful regional industries have political influence, many of them state-​owned, so firms may evade penalties or pressure from less powerful local governments or regional NDRC offices (Deng et al. 2018). Altogether, in comparative analysis, the regional pilots have been assessed as poorly performing with regards to market management and environmental relevance (Narassimhan et al. 2018). In combination with limited trade volume, the regional pilots often operate more like a sophisticated tax than a market-​based cap-​and-​trade system (Knox-​Hayes 2016). Ultimately the pilots served a learning process for the Chinese National ETS, first proposed in the thirteenth 5-​year plan in 2016. The national carbon market was expected to nearly double the global coverage of GHG emissions under global carbon pricing before 2018 (World Bank, Ecofys, and Vivid Economics 2016). The “launch” in December of 2017, however, was soft. A national roadmap was introduced, and market simulations were planned. With sector coverage starting with energy, power plants emitting more than 26 kilotons (kt)CO2 per year were asked to formulate monitoring plans and provide emissions baselines (World Bank, Ecofys, and Vivid Economics 2017). In 2018, a restructuring of the State Council saw the dissolution of the Ministry of Environmental Protection and the launch of the Ministry of Ecology and Environment, the latter slated to absorb the climate change–​related responsibilities of the NDRC, thus taking on administrative responsibilities over the planned national ETS (World Bank 2019). By 2019, lists of eligible power plants were still being requested from regional governments, methods for accounting and disclosure agreements on carbon allowances were still in interim forms, and capacity building for allocation processes across provinces had just started (World Bank 2020). In the aftermath, some observers noted that the plans have been “substantially scaled back in terms of its scope and ambition” (Swartz 2018, p. 22). The official launch has been pushed back to 2021. Relatively weak regional pilots and a long climb to a national system likely reflect the friction between market mechanisms, institutions, and the domestic political economy. Where carbon markets are typically designed around fundamentals like free markets, transparent information exchange, and property rights-​based law, China’s economy operates under a different logic of state-​market relations. To take one example, tightly controlled electricity prices in China mean that increasing the costs of energy production with allowances may not impact the downstream consumer price for energy. In order to create a market signal, schemes include the indirect emissions from energy consumption, but if the power plants are included in the carbon market as well, there’s a risk of double counting emissions. Though there is interest in price reform, attempts to liberalize energy prices have not made much progress. Would-​be reformers like the National Energy Commission or the now-​defunct State Electricity Regulatory Commission have been undermined by interministerial conflicts and the expansive political power of state-​owned enterprises with status quo preferences that dominate energy production and distribution (Lin and Purra 2019). As a result, plans for a Chinese ETS entail incongruences with its international counterparts, creating significant obstacles to linkage (Zeng, Weishaar, and Vedder 2018).

424    Carley Chavara et al. The situation is further complicated by the decision to have a carbon intensity–​based goal under its NDC (emissions per unit of gross domestic product [GDP]) as opposed to an absolute emissions cap like with European countries, masking continued emissions growth consistent with 5.1°C of warming by one estimate (Tørstad, Sælen, and Bøyum 2020). Without some assumed GDP projection over time, Stowe (2018) argues that this renders bilateral linkages under Article 6.2 of the PA unlikely without revision; a revision we have yet to see. In sum, market-​based mechanisms have been strongly mediated by the political and institutional realities in-​country that have distinguished Chinese carbon markets. That divergence also weighs heavily on the prospects for linkage in the future. Despite limited evidence that the pilot ETSs have catalyzed emissions reductions (Zhang, Duan, and Deng 2019), an ETS remains a useful tool for signaling climate leadership and actualizing the market-​based experiments that the rhetoric of “ecological civilization” encompasses.

Canada The Canadian approach to carbon markets has been driven by its particular federal structure and the history of the overall Canadian response to climate change. Specifically, such markets, as well as carbon taxes in the case of British Columbia, emerged at the subnational (provincial) level first, in the context of inaction by the federal government under Prime Minister Stephen Harper (2006–​2015). Subsequently, the government of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau (2015–​) sought to create an overall pricing-​based climate policy that had to function in the context of the patchwork that already existed. The federal government has dealt with this by recognizing existing provincial carbon pricing systems that meet the federal government’s basic requirements and required other provinces to develop their own system while reserving the right to impose such a system in the absence of provincial action (Mascher 2018). The government has chosen to coordinate the subnational systems based on price, not quantity, and with a price floor, rather than pricing levels (Parry and Mylonas 2018). A provincial ETS must have an emission reduction target at least as stringent as the national goal and must have caps that tighten in line with what emissions reductions would have been expected using a price-​based system. Exceptions are made for the emissions-​ intensive and trade-​exposed (EITE) sectors where an output-​based pricing system (OBPS) applies to address cost and carbon leakage concerns (Government of Canada 2020). The OBPS arguably functions as an ETS by setting a cap on allowable emissions of liable entities and then tightening the cap over time; excess emissions are tradeable. The resulting patchwork consists of seven different cap-​based emissions programs, including the aforementioned Quebec cap-​and-​trade program, Nova Scotia’s cap-​and-​trade program (Province of Nova Scotia 2020), Alberta’s Technology Innovation and Emissions Reduction Regulation program, Newfoundland and Labrador’s Performance Standard System (Newfoundland and Labrador 2018), British Columbia’s CleanBC Industrial Incentive Program, an OBPS administered by the federal government in four provinces and two territories (Manitoba, New Brunswick, Nunavut, Ontario, Prince Edward Island, and Yukon), and a hybrid federal and provincial OBPS in Saskatchewan. It also includes one explicit carbon tax system, in the Northwest Territories (World Bank 2020). While there is some minimal compatibility across these systems, the central pattern is one of considerable heterogeneity around key characteristics such as gas and sectoral

Continuity and Change in Carbon Market Politics    425 coverage, minimum emissions levels for an installation to be included, allocation rules, offset availability, and revenue use, as well as, of course, the basic underlying differences between a carbon tax and an ETS. Enough differences exist that negotiations would have to take place even between provinces and the federal government before any international linkages could be sought. The same considerations explored earlier for interstate carbon market linkage would likely exist in parallel at the subnational level, given the nature of Canadian federalism (Selin and VanDeveer 2009).

South Korea The South Korean ETS resulted from interest group competition and intragovernmental negotiation (Kim 2016; Heo 2015). The design of the South Korean ETS began with the debut of the “Low Carbon Green Growth” strategy in 2008 under the Lee Myung-​bak administration (2008–​2013). While the Framework Act on Low Carbon, Green Growth included provisions for both a carbon tax and an ETS, only the latter was passed. The Ministry of the Environment supported both an ETS and carbon tax while the Ministry of Strategy and Finance came out against a carbon tax. The tax was not supported by the public, and, as the Lee administration had ran on a platform of reduced taxes, the carbon tax was dropped (Kim 2016). While domestic industry groups were initially supportive of the seemingly pro-​ business Green Growth strategy for its emphasis on investment in green energy and environmental efficiency, they opposed corresponding mitigation initiatives over concerns for compliance costs and concerns for international economic competition (Heo 2015). The Ministry of Knowledge (now Ministry of Trade, Industry, and Energy) voiced opposition to an ETS alongside industry groups, and this coalition was able to delay the implementation of the policy by 2 years (Heo 2015). Once the ETS was reached as a reconciliation, negotiations among pro-​environment and pro-​industry groups had continued through the policy design stages, especially over decisions on permit allocation and cap setting. The ETS regulates direct emissions of the six Kyoto gasses from 610 of the greatest-​emitting firms as well as indirect emissions from electricity consumption, covering about 70% of national GHG emissions (ICAP 2020). Each sector has its own cap based on expected reductions, upon which allowance allocation decisions are made (Biedenkopf and Wettestad 2017). Industry groups successfully lobbied for a start of 100% free allocation from the original proposal of 90% (Heo 2015). The amount of freely allocated permits reduces over time, from 100% for 2015–​2017 to 97% in 2018–​2020, and 90% in 2021–​2025, while energy-​intensive and trade-​exposed sectors continue to receive 100% free allocation throughout (ICAP 2020). While environmental and civic groups were opposed to the final policy for lacking environmental stringency, their views were sidelined (Kim 2016; Heo 2015). While the South Korean ETS is generally considered a success based on a multicriteria assessment (Howie et al. 2020), it has failed to serve its purpose to reach South Korea’s 2020 emissions reduction target (Biedenkopf and Wettestad 2017). South Korea is projected to miss its 2020 target of reducing emissions 30% relative to a baseline by more than 100 megatons (Mt)CO2e (Climate Action Tracker 2020b). The Park Guen-​hye administration (2013–​) has abandoned tracking this goal to follow the new 2030 emissions reduction target that it has set, but the overall cap is likely not stringent enough to reach this target either.

426    Carley Chavara et al. The Ministry of Environment originally led the ETS rule writing and policy implementation, but this responsibility was given to the Ministry of Strategy and Finance in mid-​2016 (Biedenkopf and Wettestad 2017). This period on has proved a critical one for the ETS as it has faced liquidity issues. Regulations on the auction process set restrictions for who is an eligible bidder, the maximum permits they may purchase, and sets a minimum purchase. Partially due to these restrictions on permit prices and auction participants, the market has faced illiquidity issues. Scarce trading of permits has caused a marked price increase between April 2019 and April 2020 (World Bank 2020). At the same time, flexibility to achieve emissions reductions is limited since the price of the accepted offset is higher than the ETS permit price (Etienne and Yu 2017). Starting in June 2019, changes have been made to the banking regulations to increase liquidity (Howie et al. 2020). Harmonization of domestic climate policy and politics in a way that facilitates international linkage may be difficult in the case of the Korean ETS given the fragility of the bargain and the specificity of the ETS design, although there are several advantages. The Korean ETS does share some similarities with the EU ETS, as policy-​makers were able to look to the EU example during the design of the Korean ETS (Biedenkopf and Wettestad 2017). Direct carbon market linkage allowing for permit trading would improve liquidity for the Korean ETS while the larger size of the EU ETS and the lower abatement costs would reduce the carbon price for Korean firms (raising it for EU firms) and reduce carbon leakage (Hawkins and Jegou 2014). Of course, these benefits would come at the cost of the regulatory autonomy the government has maintained over the permitting and offset system. South Korea’s first exposure to carbon markets was as a host of CDM projects (Biedenkopf and Wettestad 2017). Based on this experience, the Korean ETS created a unique offsetting system that incorporates domestic CDM projects using a credit conversion process. Domestic CDM project credits can be certified as “Korean Offset Credits” that can then be converted into “Korean Credit Units” of “a specified vintage” before they can be used as offsets (ICAP 2020). These offsets are subject to further restrictions for use that are more stringent that the EU ETS, for instance. Other areas of negotiation between Korea and the European Union on linkage would include allocation readjustment, market stabilization measures, emissions coverage, penalties, and allowance borrowing rules (Hawkins and Jegou 2014).

Indonesia Indonesia is in the process of implementing a national ETS to help meet its NDC, and how its forests are incorporated will be key to the environmental stringency of the market. Emissions from land-​use, land-​use change, and forestry (LULUCF) accounted for nearly the same amount of emissions from all other economic sectors combined between 2000 and 2016. LULUCF emissions peaked in 2015 (as a result of the peatland fires) at about twice the amount of emissions from all other sources (Climate Action Tracker 2020a). Several institutions are involved in the ETS design, including the Coordinating Ministry for Economic Affairs, the Ministry of Environment and Forestry, the Ministry of Energy and Mineral Resources, and the Ministries of Industry and Finance (ICAP 2020). A restructuring of the Environment and Forestry Ministry in 2015 created a new department of

Continuity and Change in Carbon Market Politics    427 Climate Change Oversight whose portfolio includes adaptation, mitigation, and forest fire control (Saturi 2015), showing the interconnectedness of these issues. As Indonesia’s NDC goal is an emission reduction (29% unconditional, 41% conditional) relative to a “business as usual” (BAU) scenario, overall emissions are expected to nearly double by 2030 (Dune 2019). It is likely that the plurality of Indonesia’s emissions—​those coming from LULUCF—​will not be covered under the ETS, but that LULUCF emissions mitigation measures may be used for offset credits. This is in line with existing ETS worldwide, none of which includes emissions from LULUCF. To successfully limit national emissions, the ETS will have to look beyond the power and industry sectors. The Indonesian ETS is in its consideration and design phase, with a pilot ETS for the power and industry sectors set for 2021, with the goal of going live in 2024 (World Bank 2020; Carbon Pulse 2020). It is expected that rules will start with a voluntary domestic ETS for the power sector that will later become mandatory. It is currently planned that cap-​and-​ trade can be used to incentivize forest conservation through generation of carbon credits for avoided deforestation, but properly accounting for the carbon content will be a key challenge (Basorie 2013). Linking an ETS inclusive of LULUCF with other markets would require coordination on key aspects of forest carbon accounting, such as determining baselines and additionality and dealing with uncertainty. Despite their methodological appearance, these details are subjective, with their negotiation serving as a contested site infused with politics (Gifford 2020). The inclusion of forest offsets into ETS has been particularly controversial going back to the KP flexibility mechanisms’ negotiations (Bäckstrand and Lövbrand 2006), and forest offsets are explicitly banned for use in the EU ETS, notably. In this case, a good candidate for linkage would be the California-​Quebec carbon market. Quebec is currently in the process of finalizing requirements for offset credits through afforestation and reforestation (Ministry of Environment and the Fight Against Climate Change 2020). California, meanwhile, has allowed forest carbon offsets under the Improved Forest Management program. The California example offers a warning that, in addition to the cost and complexity of regulating forest carbon offsets, the program has resulted in uneven benefit flows. The very technical capacity necessary to meet accounting requirements creates a barrier to participation for landowners lacking financial resources while creating dependence on third-​party experts (Clover Kelly and Bongiovanni Schmitz 2016). Further distribution effects would have to be considered in system where offsets are linked.

Conclusion In this chapter we have analyzed some of the recent initiatives and developments in carbon market design. In doing so we have underscored that, while there has been a general transnationally generated diffusion of carbon markets as key elements in climate policy, implementation has been shaped by the considerable variety of institutional and political-​ economic contexts in each country. In Indonesia, most notably, it has been shaped by the importance of forestry to domestic climate policy, while such concerns are absent elsewhere. In the European Union, it has been molded by the complexity of its multilevel governance system, which includes attempts by the Commission to use the ETS as a means of furthering European integration. In Canada, the dynamics of its highly decentralized

428    Carley Chavara et al. federal system has made it harder to coordinate policy design across Canadian provinces than is the case across EU Member States. In China, it has been structured by the rhetorical commitment to experimenting with decentralized market approaches, as well as the rigidity of a highly controlled energy sector and dominant state-​owned enterprises. In Korea, it has been structured most obviously by the dynamics of the country’s high-​carbon industrial structure and reliance on state-​firm bargaining. Each of these contexts has shaped the specific dynamics of carbon markets as they have emerged and evolved in each place. These also explain in large measure the problems encountered by those seeking to link such markets in their pursuit of economically efficient climate policy and/​or rules within the PA to promote such market linkages. For example, once Canada went down a road of requiring provinces to develop their own systems (which could be carbon markets but could also be carbon taxes) that only met minimal federal conditions regarding coverage and the carbon price, the costs of attempting to link such systems to other jurisdictions would become prohibitive. Or, when Indonesia’s system becomes more or less completely focused on forestry, linking to most other systems would be impossible if only because the accounting systems comparing emissions from deforestation (or even more so for negative emissions from afforestation) would generate huge credibility problems when other systems are mostly regulating industrial or transport emissions. Nevertheless, political leaders in various countries see at least political value in developing them, whether or not they contribute to the sorts of transformations we need to achieve decarbonization. What this chapter has shown is perhaps paradoxical: the specifics of carbon market policy design are driven largely by national political and institutional characteristics, but many types of political systems develop carbon markets in general despite this variety. Otherwise put, the chapter contributes to arguments that see the importance of integrating accounts of comparative environmental politics with those of global or transnational environmental politics—​outcomes here are determined both by the dynamics of national institutional settings as well as by the pursuit of global agreements and transnational diffusion processes but not reducible to any of these individually. In part this is because there remain significant global pressures—​from the PA itself, but also from institutions like the World Bank—​that promote such forms of climate policy design. The desire to link markets (even if it proves impossible) also generates ongoing incentives to recognize the value of such international-​level institutions in coordinating some basic design elements (e.g., the basic unit of account, the accounting rules, and the multilaterally agreed ambition for each participating country) that would make market linkage easier to achieve even while the possibility of a KP form of such institutional infrastructure that created a more or less automatic “linkage” mechanism—​countries could simply buy credits or allowances from the KP systems—​is now impossible. The design of the PA has, by contrast, enabled the underlying national institutional variation to generate substantial divergence in carbon market design, further undermining possibilities of market linkage. But perhaps this bad news for enthusiasts of a “global carbon market” is not bad news for climate policy. As Jessica Green (2017) has argued, there are good reasons to oppose linking carbon markets. In particular, it would weaken the incentive to reduce national emissions and weaken whatever transformative potential (along with suites of other policies) carbon markets might have to trigger decarbonization by reinforcing the single-​minded focus on

Continuity and Change in Carbon Market Politics    429 the cheapest short-​term emissions cuts rather than the more important work of patiently but seriously “changing everything.”

Notes 1. We use “carbon markets” as the most general term to denote policy instruments to create markets to trade in carbon emissions rights. They are often understood as one of two main means of carbon pricing (alongside carbon taxes) and take two principal forms. The first are emissions trading systems (ETS; also known as cap-​and-​trade), where emissions rights are allocated, within an overall cap on emissions levels, by an authority to entities (corporations in most systems, nations in the Kyoto Protocol system) that then have to hold the number of such rights to cover their actual emissions levels. The second is known as carbon offset markets, where projects are developed to reduce emissions and then the emissions saved are sold on as credits to others who wish to compensate (offset) their own emissions. 2. Here “linkage” refers to rules that facilitate exchange and use of allowances or credits issued in one carbon market (e.g., the EU ETS) within another market (e.g., the California ETS). We recognize there are a range of other uses of the term “linkage” in comparative politics that we are not addressing. 3. The language of “top-​down vs. bottom-​up” was used widely from the 2000s onward to characterize the difference in design between the KP and what would become the PA by 2015. We use it because it has become a recognized way of denoting the difference between the two, but we keep it in scare quotes because it profoundly oversimplifies the differences between the KP and the PA and should be understood as much as the result of an ideological onslaught, mostly within the United States, on the KP, as of a coherence conceptual schema. 4. Linked countries may have the perverse incentive to lower ambition, raise caps, and increase the volume of allowances to reduce domestic compliance costs as opposed to buying them from a linked market. As Green et al. (2014) point out, “linking without an agreement on targets would be like a monetary union between countries where each had the right to print money.” 5. The departure of the United Kingdom from the European Union has perhaps left less of a mark than had been speculated, given the UK’s historical status as a major purchaser of EU allowances (Hepburn and Teytelboym 2017). That being said, the United Kingdom was arguably important in strengthening EU policy ambition: increasing GHG emission cut targets at Copenhagen and driving leadership on backloading and on the MSR (Dupont and Moore 2019).

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Pa rt V

E N V I RON M E N TA L J U ST IC E A N D R IG H T S

Chapter 23

The C om parati v e P ol i t i c s of Environ me nta l Ju stic e Kemi Fuentes-​G eorge Introduction: What Is Environmental Justice? Justice has been a key part of the environmentalist movement within and across boundaries since the 1980s. However, the language and rhetoric of environmental justice and related terms (environmental injustice, racism, and rights, among others) have origins that are largely American. One of the key documents introducing the concepts of environmental racism and injustice is the 1987 report by the United Church of Christ’s Commission for Racial Justice on toxic waste and race (Commission for Racial Justice 1987). The impetus of this report was the social mobilization of black and Latinx communities, primarily in the southern United States, that were concerned about the concentration of toxic waste sites in communities of color (Bullard 2000; Lester et al. 2001; Commission for Racial Justice 1987). The report argued that this pattern, whereby black and Latinx communities overlapped closely with environmentally hazardous toxic waste sites, was not accidental but rather the result of a program of both institutional and explicit racism. The authors further argued that environmental movements should therefore engage with racial disparities, as doing so would be not only morally just, but also a more comprehensive way of fighting the accumulation of hazardous toxins on a national level within the United States (Commission for Racial Justice 1987). As scholars later pointed out, institutional and deliberate racism made it easier for societies to overproduce environmental harms, particularly if these harms could be made invisible, by externalizing them to vulnerable but marginalized populations (Pellow 2006; Mohai et al. 2009; Agyeman et al. 2003). By failing to engage with this, the “colorblind” mainstream environmentalism of the 1980s would be unable to address the underlying social factors that drive environmental harm (Pellow 2006; Mohai et al. 2009; Bullard 2000). In the decades since, it has become clear that environmental justice struggles are not just an American phenomenon. Environmental justice and injustice are deeply

438   Kemi Fuentes-George rooted in the trajectory of socio-​economic development and environmental stress in the postcolonial world. Similarly, as the activists and scholars of US environmental politics have found, social justice movements in the postcolonial world can also strengthen and create more sustainable environmental practices. To understand the connection between environmental harm and social justice, it is necessary to understand what some of these key terms mean. At its root, the challenges of environmental justice stem from the fact that all of our social well-​being, productivity, and reproductivity depends on consuming natural resources directly (e.g., burning fossil fuels) and indirectly (dumping pollutants into water sources). Environmental injustice is a condition in which (1) the benefits of this consumption accrue primarily to socially privileged populations, (2) the costs of this consumption are primarily borne by socially marginalized populations in situations where (3) these marginalized populations are systematically excluded from shaping decisions around how these costs and benefits are distributed (Carruthers 2008; Pellow 2006; Kashwan 2017; Mohai et al. 2009; Fuentes-​George 2016a; Gellars and Jeffords 2018; Walker 2012). While injustice is a common feature of environmental struggles across countries, it should be noted that different political systems will have particular versions of these core concepts: marginalization, systematic exclusion, and environmental costs and benefits. This is due not only to the different ways in which political systems like single-​party autocracies, military dictatorships, and patron-​clientelist regimes structure participation and decision-​making, but also to differences in the natural environment and composition of environmental threats. For example, environmental benefits could be access to water, land use rights, or access to certain consumer goods. The “bads” could be exposure to toxic waste and chemicals or dispossession and dislocation from generationally held lands. The marginalized populations could be defined by race, class, gender, ethnicity, or by some combination of these. There are variations on all these metrics in environmental justice struggles from Australia, Brazil, China, Ecuador, and elsewhere, some of which are discussed in this chapter. But in all cases, the pattern of environmental injustice is that the privileged benefit, while the marginalized disproportionately bear the cost of continued environmental exploitation. Environmental injustice is therefore a product of the intersection between environmental degradation and social marginalization. In the following sections, I explore what scholars and activists mean by the term “environmental justice.” As currently conceptualized, there is a broad consensus that a society can move toward environmental justice when it creates mechanisms through which marginalized people can participate meaningfully in a political system and when the society adopts more environmentally sustainable practices. However, as the cases presented here also indicate, there are still unsettled controversies, even among environmentalists, about how to pursue justice. For example, as we have seen in some struggles for environmental sustainability worldwide, increasing the ability of marginalized groups to participate politically may exacerbate, not decrease, pressure on natural resources. In those cases, it is not clear who should have the final say in determining what counts as “good” environmental policy. Furthermore, it is not clear whether environmental justice and rights only apply to humans or whether they also apply to non-​human living species. Later, I indicate how the legacy of colonialism and imperialism has shaped these controversies by constraining the agency of people who became marginalized because of the creation of the modern nation-​state. By centering colonialism, I return to a critique of “colorblind” mainstream

The Comparative Politics of Environmental Justice    439 environmentalism: as “colorblind” environmentalism can also propagate racist and ecologically unsustainable policies. I conclude by focusing on the lessons to be learned from the successful cases of environmental justice struggles.

Defining Environmental Justice: A Contested Term Balancing Procedural and Substantive Elements of Environmental Justice Implicit in the discussion of environmental justice is the existence of environmental rights (Gellars and Jeffords 2018; also see Gellars and Jeffords, this volume). As Hiskes explains, “as a matter of [environmental] justice, all citizens . . . possess the environmental human rights to clean air, water, and soil” (Hiskes 2009, p. 2). Broadly speaking, we can move toward a more just society to the extent that rights are protected or if there is adequate redress when those rights are violated. Importantly, as Hiskes and others point out, the call for justice is more than a call for morally good policies. The language of justice and rights implies that there are, or at least should be, mechanisms through which violations of rights can be redressed (Hiskes 2009; Anton and Shelton 2011; Humphreys 2017; Gellars and Jeffords 2018; Villavicencio Calzadilla and Kotzé 2018). In the context of the environment, there are at least two dimensions to the language of rights and justice: substantive, and procedural. First, those who argue for a justice-​oriented frame to environmentalism are clear that every living person has a substantive right to a clean environment. After all, if a person has no access to clean air and water and is being poisoned by the accumulation of toxins in their immediate environment, they will be unable to fully exercise other commonly recognized rights, like freedom of speech or assembly (Hiskes 2009; Anton and Shelton 2011; Gellars and Jeffords 2018). Second, to pursue environmental justice, each person, particularly the most marginalized, should have a procedural right to influence how the environment is consumed in a society. This includes, but is not limited to, strong voting rights and environmental regulatory institutions that are independent and accountable to public concerns. As indicated later, many countries have created some mechanisms specific to environmentalism and social justice, including constitutional amendments protecting a right to nature, creating environmental agencies with public environmental impact assessments (EIAs), and establishing organizations specifically focused on the rights of the marginalized. One notable example would be US President Bill Clinton’s 1994 Executive Order requiring the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to engage in environmental justice in its application of federal environmental laws. This Executive Order emerged directly out of the activism discussed earlier around environmental racism and the United Church of Christ report. In addition, the post-​apartheid government in South Africa established under the 1996 constitution a right to a healthy environment (du Plessis 2011). Nevertheless, these developments are still nascent, particularly when compared to the more developed field of political and civil rights. In 2017, the Trump administration proposed defunding the

440   Kemi Fuentes-George environmental justice program of the EPA (Dennis 2017). Similarly, despite the constitutional right to a healthy environment, environmental groups in South Africa launched a lawsuit against the government in 2019, stating that it has consistently failed to protect black communities in the Mpumalanga Highveld region from hazardous air pollution (Center for Environmental Rights 2019). The existence of mechanisms that can be used to promote environmental justice is crucial but clearly not sufficient (du Plessis 2011).

Tensions in Implementing Environmental Justice: Lessons from Case Studies In theory, environmental justice movements should combine procedural goals, where the voices of the marginalized are heard, with substantive improvements in consumption and environmental use. In practice, the procedural goals of greater participation sometimes conflict with the substantive goals of better environmental protection. In Ecuador in the early 1990s for example, one of the major environmental threats was oil exploration. In the Amazonian region, multinational companies like the Atlantic Richfield Company (ARCO) drilled for oil, leaving behind a mounting list of environmental problems, including water pollution, denuded land, and oil spills (Sawyer 2004). The largely Indigenous communities who lived in these areas had their land and water degraded to the point of nonviability, along with an increase in cancer rates and respiratory and skin illnesses (Sawyer 2004). Some Indigenous groups emerged to push for Indigenous rights, but importantly, not all were opposed to oil extraction. The Intercommunitarian Directive of the Independent Communities of Pastaza (DICIP) advocated specifically for a greater share of revenue to those Indigenous communities that cooperated with the government and oil corporations (Sawyer 2004). For anti-​oil Indigenous groups, DICIP’s preferred goals would have meant continued and unacceptable environmental degradation. Similar dynamics have shaped land management in the Appalachian region of the United States. While Appalachian residents are not ethnically or racially distinct from the dominant class in the way that Indigenous people are in Ecuador, they are economically marginalized, with unemployment and poverty rates well above the national average. In this region, one of the major environmental threats is mountaintop coal mining, where explosives are used to remove the tops of mountains and extract coal. This is highly polluting, as companies dump waste into valleys and streams, and dust and particulates released by mining pollute the air and local water supply (Baller and Pantilat 2007; Bell 2017). Like the Indigenous in Ecuador, residents in Appalachian mining communities disproportionately suffer from a host of illnesses, including organ and bone damage and increased rates of cancers, in addition to the loss of land and water (Baller and Pantilat 2007). And yet, like the Indigenous in Ecuador, many of these most vulnerable residents have supported coal mining and the industry, precisely because this fossil fuel extraction brings jobs and revenue in exchange for environmental degradation (Bell 2017; Deaton 2018). On the other hand, political systems sometimes pursue substantively good environmental policies with minimal participation from marginalized peoples. This has long been one of the principal challenges to conservation, particularly in countries in the Global South that have adopted a growing number of conservation areas aimed at arresting declines in

The Comparative Politics of Environmental Justice    441 biodiversity (West et al. 2008). In too many cases, the substantive goal of environmental protection came at the expense of the procedural rights of marginalized peoples who were given little say in the imposition of conservation-​oriented restrictions on human activity. The precise way in which local people were procedurally excluded varies across cases. For example, during the 1970s and 1980s, under one-​party rule under the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) in Mexico, the Mexican federal government created three prominent conservation reserves at Calakmul, Montes Azules, and the Monarch Reserve with little to no local consultation (Kashwan 2017). In those cases, constitutional guarantees to Indigenous people and campesino communities through, among other things, the ejido system (ejidos are plots of communally held land intended primarily for agriculture) combined with the very real possibility of militant resistance against land grabs, sharply limited the government’s ability to ignore or repress local land claims. Later in this chapter, I discuss other cases in the Global South in which governments with different political makeups and less public accountability have been far more willing and able to use the economy of violence to carry out conservation programs. Even if these programs are entirely effective in halting or reversing biodiversity loss in their countries, no environmental justice scholar would describe these situations as just. Skeptics of environmental justice have used this tension to argue that social justice is inherently contradictory with environmentalism (Lester et al. 2001; Walker 2012). There is logic behind this. Poverty kills as surely as does environmental contamination, and preventing economic opportunities in marginalized areas in the interest of environmentalism runs the risk of exacerbating local poverty (Clegg 2016; Blais 1996; Lester et al. 2001; Walker 2012). In fact, the narrative from governments in the Global South is precisely that the immediate and certain needs of poverty alleviation trump the future and still unknown losses of environmental degradation (Fuentes-​George 2016a, 2013). As Pellow noted, this narrative is often described in shorthand by the saying, “no smoke, no jobs.”(Pellow 2006)

Justice Between Species and Generations Adjudicating between rights and justice claims among different people becomes more complex when we expand our definition of what constitutes a legal person. The concept of environmental rights and justice has been interpreted in some cases, as in Australia; Bolivia; Ecuador; India; Toledo, Ohio; and New Zealand, as necessitating the extension of rights and justice claims—​and therefore legal personhood—​to non-​animal living things. These include ecosystems like rivers, forests, and mountains (O’Donnell and Talbot-​Jones 2018; Westerman 2019; Humphreys 2017; Villavicencio Calzadilla and Kotzé 2018; Anton and Shelton 2011; National Geographic 2019). Not everyone who writes about environmental justice agrees. Some, like Watson and Hiskes, are clear that making rights and justice claims requires the principle of reciprocity among claimants (Hiskes 2009; Watson 1979, 1983; Anton and Shelton 2011). While pets might be able to show affection to humans, non-​human living things, especially non-​ animals, are not part of human society and therefore cannot reciprocate behavior in the same way other humans can do so. Centering humans in this way creates an explicitly anthropocentric approach to understanding environmental rights (Watson 1979, 1983; Katz and Oechsli 1993; Norton 1984; Sterba 1994; Anton and Shelton 2011).

442   Kemi Fuentes-George However, proponents of non-​human environmental rights counter that treating environmental justice as strictly anthropocentric reduces all the complexity of nature to something purely instrumental for people. The danger in doing so, they argue, is that it risks replicating the exact consumptive logic that is driving the current environmental crisis. That is, if nature is to be valued purely for its utility to human beings, there is a risk that fully participatory and inclusive societies might as a result overexploit the environment (Katz and Oechsli 1993). From this perspective, opponents of the anthropogenic view of environmental rights state that all living things have a right to life and that this right should not be idly dispensed with. The idea that non-​human living things have legally recognized rights and that these rights should constrain the ability of humans to do as they wish with animals is not unprecedented. Currently, most countries in the world have some enforceable laws prohibiting human-​caused animal suffering, even though these laws vary widely in scope and severity (World Animal Protection 2020). Countries as diverse as Niger, India, and the United States have laws against animal cruelty, for example (World Animal Protection 2020). More explicit language about the right of non-​human living things can be found in Chapter 7 of the Ecuadorian Constitution, which states that “Nature, or Pacha Mama, where life is reproduced and occurs, has the right to integral respect for its existence and for the maintenance and regeneration of its life cycles, structure, functions and evolutionary processes” (Republic of Ecuador 2008). Although the 2009 Bolivian Constitution does not recognize a right to nature, a subsidiary law passed in 2010, the Law of the Rights of Mother Earth, does, calling on the state or “any individual or collective person” to defend these rights (Villavicencio Calzadilla and Kotzé 2018, p. 409). These arguments reflect the sentiments of American scholar Christopher Stone who said, “the death that occupies each human’s imagination is not his own, but that of the entire life cycle of the planet earth, to which each of us is as but a cell to a body”(Anton and Shelton 2011; National Geographic 2019). Of course, neither Stone nor the constitutions of Ecuador, Bolivia, or other systems with this approach say that natural resources should never be consumed. However, if nature has a right to exist, society should respect the rights of nature to replenish itself, even if doing so contradicts the interests of some human members of society. To be clear, there have been conceptual attempts to reconcile the anthropocentric approach of environmental rights espoused by Hiskes with the non-​ anthropocentric approach of Christopher Stone and the Bolivian Constitution. In short, this blended, or “weak anthropocentric” approach indicates that, in many cases, the idea that nature is a living being can be found in the belief systems of Indigenous or tribal people whose political and juridical systems were erased in the creation of the modern nation-​state (Norton 1984; Humphreys 2017). In other words, respecting the “rights of nature” is another way of respecting and recognizing those Indigenous and tribal systems that first recognized and treated the natural environment as a living being. For example, in New Zealand, the Maori community successfully pushed the government to declare the Whanganui River a legal person by arguing that the Whanganui was an ancestor and a living being essential to the Maori tribe. When New Zealand agreed, Gerrard Albert of the Whanganui tribal collective stated that this was a national “recognition that the river is the ‘indivisible and living whole’ of Maori understanding, and not the fragmented, inanimate components of water, bed, banks, tributaries, and catchment that has been the European approach” (National Geographic 2019).

The Comparative Politics of Environmental Justice    443 The converse of this is also clear. If certain worldviews become associated with respect for and increased participation of Indigenous or other marginalized peoples, there is a possibility that anti-​Indigenous or anti-​marginalized regimes will seek to reverse the development of the “rights of nature” discourse. In 2019, for example, after the Bolivian Indigenous president Evo Morales was ousted, the new regime under Añez Chávez rejected the concept of Pachamama, with an Añez ally and protest leader saying on video that “the Bible is returning to the government palace. Pachamama will never return” (Estes 2019). Although it is not clear what this will mean for environmental policy per se, it does indicate a potential hostility to Indigenous perspectives on environmental governance. To be clear, declaring a river, forest, or mountain to be a legal person is not enough to move toward an environmentally just society, without mechanisms in place to make newly recognized rights justiciable (Hiskes 2009). Consequently, these systems have established, with varying degrees of power, entities that have the standing to act on behalf of nature. In New Zealand, the Whanganui River, personified in the concept Te Awa Tupua, has government-​appointed guardians that legally have to be consulted before any changes are carried out to the river (O’Donnell and Talbot-​Jones 2018; Westerman 2019). Similarly, in the Australian state of Victoria, local rivers are represented by the Victorian Environmental Water Holder (VEWH), which has the ability to enter into contracts, sue, and be sued in its capacity as river guardian (O’Donnell and Talbot-​Jones 2018). The use of human beings to represent the rights of non-​human living things in judicial systems is not without precedent. After all, legal scholars have long noted that corporations are not human beings, yet themselves are also represented in courts by those who are, in effect, legal guardians (Anton and Shelton 2011; Hiskes 2009; Humphreys 2017; Wise 2016; O’Donnell and Talbot-​Jones 2018). In contrast, some systems have passed laws or drafted constitutions with sweeping rhetoric but with limited or no enforcement or implementation. Bolivia is an excellent example of this gap between promise and reality. Although the Morales regime led to real improvements in the socio-​economic well-​being of Indigenous people, there had been no significant change in the drafting or implementation of environmental laws, and it remained an economy heavily dependent on natural resource mining and extraction (Villavicencio Calzadilla and Kotzé 2018; Diaz-​Cuellar 2017). Finally, proponents of extending the language of rights beyond living human beings have argued that, due to the long-​term effects of environmental degradation, our excessive consumption will make the world uninhabitable for our children and grandchildren. As a result, we should also extend the notion of rights and justice to future generations (Hiskes 2009). However, in contrast to the extension of the legal personhood of nature in the above-​ mentioned cases, among others, there has been no attempt as of the time of writing to create an enforceable legal framework respecting the rights of future generations.

Environmental Justice as a Postcolonial Reality Clearly, as the preceding cases indicate, moving toward environmental justice in contemporary political systems is complex. Still, despite the challenges in balancing procedural with

444   Kemi Fuentes-George substantive justice (made more complex by the possibility of non-​human environmental rights), it is important to recognize that environmentalism and social justice do not necessarily conflict. In the first place, strengthening participatory rights and procedural justice for marginalized groups can and does produce substantively good environmental outcomes in some cases. Second, it is important to recognize that the apparent antipathy of low-​ income communities to environmentalism is often due to structural conditions. In other words, it is not clear that marginalized communities choose to subscribe to the “no smoke, no jobs” approach, but rather that “no smoke, no jobs” describes the way in which their socio-​ economic marginalization constrains their choices. This is particularly clear in the Global South, where the legacy of colonialism has shaped both the use of the environment and the positioning of marginalized communities. If environmental injustice is the accumulation of environmental harms in marginalized populations, then the issues that lead to environmental injustice are inseparable from the broader processes of social marginalization: racism, sexism, anti-​indigeneity, xenophobia, and classism. In other words, we cannot understand how environmental injustice operates without understanding the historical and structural development of marginalization in political systems and the ways in which this constrains the choices of people. As the cases indicate, the construction of environmental threats and the construction of marginalized identity is closely linked in the postcolonial world, such that “the exploitation of humans and the environment is a unified practice” (Pellow 2006, p. 5).

Examples of Environmental Justice Issues in Comparative Perspective: Crucial Case Studies The connection between environmental stress and social inequality is particularly clear around land use patterns in the Global South. The global spread of colonialism created racialized peoples who were considered “wild,” or savage, backward, and undeveloped in comparison with the post-​Enlightenment European descendants. These “wild” people also had “wild” socio-​political systems in an equally “wild” and savage land. Thus, it was the racial duty of colonizers and settlers to “civilize” the land and its people. Ecologically, this meant erasing prior land-​use patterns and transforming preexisting ways of using natural resources to fit with the goals of modernization—​usually, large-​scale agriculture and urbanization. Socially, this also meant structural and systematic violence against people who became non-​white or racially Othered in the process. Politically, the newly created systems further perpetuated this racialized alienation from the land by creating de jure and de facto social, economic, and cultural barriers to full participation and recognition of the Indigenous peoples. All of this was done as the founding logic of creating the nation-​state (Pellow 2006). In the United States, John Locke justified the seizure and conversion of Indigenous lands as necessary to turn the “wild woods and uncultivated waste of America” into productive usage and away from the practices of the “wild Indian, who (knew) no enclosure” (Kashwan 2017, p. 38). In India under British colonialism, the native Indians who were “ ‘jungly people’ living in ‘jungly landscapes’ forfeited the natural right of property in land because they

The Comparative Politics of Environmental Justice    445 failed to produce its highest possible value” (Kashwan 2017, p. 39). In Mexico, the incorporation of the state of Quintana Roo into the federal system was justified on the basis that, despite the presence of Indigenous people, the land was in essence a blank space (Fuentes-​ George 2016a). In the Brazilian Amazon, the expropriation of land from Indigenous people and the conversion of natural forest to urbanized settlements and large-​scale industrialized agriculture was also rationalized by portraying indigenes as backward, savage, and standing in the way of progress (Khagram 2004). In some cases, the explicitly racist language linking environmental exploitation with Indigenous oppression is still apparent. Jair Bolsonaro, elected president of Brazil in 2018, came to power promising to bring “development” to the Amazonian region. Of the Indigenous people who lived there, Bolsonaro stated that they were “evolving, more and more like humans,” but that their territories were still “an obstacle to agri-​business” (Survival International 2020). The underlying threats to dispossess Indigenous peoples from their land in the interest of development have not just been rhetorical. The Bolsonaro Administration undermined Indigenous control over local land uses by, among other things, taking away oversight over the demarcation of Indigenous lands from the Department of Indigenous Affairs (FUNAI) and shifting it to the Department of Agriculture (Raftopoulos and Morley 2020). Even though FUNAI has not always been able to defend Indigenous land rights against large-​scale agro-​industry and urbanizing development, it is still far closer to Indigenous interests than the agricultural sector, which historically has seen Indigenous claims as an obstacle to economic growth (Hochstetler and Keck 2007; Khagram 2004). Consequently, under Bolsonaro, mining, logging, and large-​scale clearing of the Amazon have increased as Indigenous land rights have been rolled back (Casado and Londoño 2019; Raftopoulos and Morley 2020). While it is worth reiterating the point that different trajectories of political development have led to different forms of postcolonial institutionalization and land use development, Brazil, India, and Mexico all share similar patterns where race was used as a founding principle to shape environmental management as well as socio-​political participation (Khagram 2004; Hochstetler and Keck 2007; Fuentes-​George 2016a; Kashwan 2017). Furthermore, in the postcolonial era, environmental injustice has been driven not just by explicitly racist practices, but more often from racially neutral policies built on an underlying structure of injustice. Marginalized people, by definition, lack political power. The tendency of political systems is to shift the environmental and social costs of development to those people who are less likely to push back. Even when policy-​makers and planners do not deliberately target racial and ethnic minorities as a specific goal of development, as occurred during colonialism, the same kinds of racialized patterns can emerge. The construction of large dams illustrates how harms can be distributed to vulnerable populations absent deliberate malice. Large dams, like many projects funded by the World Bank and international agencies in the 1980s and 1990s, were intended to bring modernization to the Global South (Khagram 2004; Braun 2011). These projects were supported by Global South governments and, in contrast to the explicitly racist language of settler colonialism in the Amazon, were not aimed at dispossessing ethnic or racial minorities. That is, proponents of dams did not justify the construction of dams as necessary to take away land from the “jungly Indian.” In practice, however, the social and environmental costs of large dam construction have been dispersed along racial, ethnic, and class lines as surely as if they had been done so deliberately.

446   Kemi Fuentes-George Although they are sometimes described as a source of “clean energy,” emitting less greenhouse gases than fossil fuel plants, large dams nevertheless can cause significant social and environmental problems. Dams require the flooding of large areas of land upstream from construction and the transformation of a river’s hydrology and flow. As a result, prior land uses in newly submerged areas are literally washed away, and people who formerly depended on the land may be dislocated as a result of dam construction. Sometimes this dislocation occurs because previously important agricultural or cultural land is lost, sometimes it occurs because residential land is appropriated for construction (Khagram 2004; Braun 2011). In Lesotho and India, flooding and land clearing associated with the construction of dams displaced tens to hundreds of thousands of residents in rural communities. Again, there are important differences in cases. In India, the displaced had the additional misfortune of being classified as adivasis, or tribal Indigenous peoples, whereas the rural Basotho in Lesotho were not ethnically distinct from mainstream Lesotho citizens, although they were substantially poorer. Nevertheless, the responses of the state and federal governments of India and the national government of Lesotho to displaced peoples were remarkably similar. In both cases, national governments worked with international agencies to design compensation packages for those displaced peoples. However, in compensating families, development agencies largely distributed payments to the heads of households, which almost always meant men, and only in those cases where land tenure could be formally established. This had the effect of marginalizing those people whose land tenure was based on traditional or common law holding and making women heads of households more land insecure (Kashwan 2017; Khagram 2004; Braun 2011). Furthermore, in Lesotho, the employment opportunities around the construction of large dams were stratified across race and gender. As agriculture and subsistence production was curtailed due to construction, the new engineering and supervisory positions created around the dam disproportionately went to foreigners (largely whites from South Africa), construction opportunities went to Basotho men, and Basotho women were left with few opportunities outside of domestic labor (Braun 2011). As often occurs with women pressured into domestic work due to economic dislocation (Enloe 2014), some of these women began working as sex workers for the (mostly white) development professionals working on the dam project (Braun 2011). Thus, even without being specifically designed to victimize Black women, the economic and physical dislocation of dam construction overlay existing economic, political, and racial marginalization of Black Lesotho women so that the burdens of dam construction and environmental degradation were distributed along these same lines. Finally, because of the systemic nature of socio-​political marginalization, environmental injustice can even emerge in ways where environmental hazards are not deliberately apportioned at all. Climate change has been one of the fundamental drivers of environmental stress. The dangers of climate change have already been well-​documented and include rising sea levels, thawing permafrost (which can damage buildings and transportation in Arctic areas), droughts, flooding, and increased storm intensity (IPCC 2014). Unlike the placing of a dam or the conversion of pastoral land to urban settlement, the location and timing of hurricanes and droughts are not subject to the same kinds of calculations of political elites. Nevertheless, domestic political systems can produce local conditions of injustice in response to global environmental problems (Anguelovski and Roberts 2011).

The Comparative Politics of Environmental Justice    447 For instance, in the United States, federal, state, and local governments historically used economic and political incentives to deliberately promote racial segregation (Kendi 2017). As white people abandoned areas that became majority Black, they took with them a stable tax base and community investment which, combined with a shrinking social safety net, left Black and Latinx communities tremendously underfunded (Fuentes-​George 2016b). In places like New Orleans, this meant Black communities had to confront poorly maintained infrastructure, which left them more environmentally vulnerable to storms and hurricanes, but also a lack of investment in public and private transportation. Consequently, when storms like Hurricane Katrina hit the United States, Black and brown people are more vulnerable to environmental catastrophe due to the legacy of these racialized policies (Rydin 2006; Cutter et al. 2003; Fuentes-​George 2016b). This section has focused largely on environmental justice struggles involving the rural marginalized in Appalachia, the Ecuadorian and Bolivian Amazon, and the Whanganui River Basin in New Zealand, among others. Nevertheless, it is important to remember that the narrative of environmental justice emerged out of urban struggles for representation and environmental health. Therefore, in much the same way that we can see similar (but not identical) patterns of marginalization and environmental hazards between Indian adivasis and Bolivian Indigenous populations, we can see similar patterns between the concerns of urban Black and Latinx communities in the southern United States during the 1980s and marginalized urban communities among countries in the Global South. In Kingston, Jamaica, for example, during British colonialism the urban Black proletariat was concentrated in the inner-​city slums near Kingston Harbor, while the white and light-​ skinned brown economic elite resided primarily in the “uptown” areas of Upper St. Andrew and the outskirts of the city. Even though Jamaica did not have the same kind of codified racism as did the Jim Crow South of the United States, racist attitudes against dark-​skinned Blacks by the white and light-​skinned population meant the urban Black poor have been geographically and racially segregated in ways similar to Black Americans (Dodman 2004; Gray 2003; Thame 2011). This exacerbates the fact that one of the major environmental crises facing the urban Black poor is the steady flow of Kingston’s municipal waste to the inner-​city, collecting in poorly managed, open-​air dumps at places like Riverton, which then leach chemicals and bacteria into the local environment, attract disease vectors like flies and rats, and often catch fire (Dodman 2004). Despite the documented hazards associated with the Riverton dump, there has been no change in its management, and the societal acceptance of the continued air and water pollution occasioned by the dump mirrors the acceptance of the United States of the externalization of toxic waste sites to urban Black and Latinx communities. Throughout the industrialized and industrializing world, we can see multiple examples of societies shifting environmental hazards, either deliberately or through institutionalized habits, to the urban poor. Although the racial composition differs across cases, society has tended to treat the accumulation of waste and environmental hazards as “invisible” if it happens to the right people, whether in the Mexican cities of Oaxaca (Moore 2008) and Torreón (Díez and Rodríguez 2008); Kingston, Jamaica; or in Durban, South Africa (Anguelovski and Roberts 2011). Since environmental injustice can occur in rich and poor countries, across urban and rural areas, affecting differently raced demographics, it is important to recognize that the term “the Global South” refers to a state of marginalization that is not reducible to any one kind of country or location (Pellow 2006; Anguelovski and

448   Kemi Fuentes-George Roberts 2011). Rather, it is a global process of marginalization that is mediated by different local political and social exigencies.

Injustice Embedded in Environmental Solutions Ironically, injustice can also be produced through the same mechanisms that countries take to solve environmental problems. I return here to the discussion of conservation in the Global South. Given the increasing rate of anthropogenic biodiversity loss, international society, including UN organizations, conservation nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and the Secretariats of environmental agreements, have pushed governments to conserve the natural environment (Secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity 2014). Unfortunately, these actors have often used the same kind of colonialist approach in constructing conservation programs as were used to justify settling and “racing” the nation-​ state (Kashwan 2017; Sand 2012; Dowie 2005; Brockington 2002; Fuentes-​George 2016a; Chapin 2004). As indicated in the following paragraphs, conservationist programs and organizations far too often treat Indigenous and rural communities as too “backward” or uneducated to be involved in conservation planning. The similarities between the attitudes toward the marginalized held by colonizers and those held by conservationists do not end there. Although settler colonialism and postcolonial conservation differ in their stated goals about the environment, both involve further extension of control over land that has been “insufficiently” included under state authority (West 2006; Kashwan 2017; Peluso 1993). Where the modernizing logic of settlement meant that the “wild” or “jungly” Other stood in the way of progress, there is a strain of conservation that sees the “unruly” Other as interfering with the “proper” way to do conservation. Under this logic, governments desiring good conservation programs create management protocols with explicitly exclusionary practices using top-​down hardline policies to prevent people from using natural resources in the interest of environmentalism. These burdens are generally felt most acutely by those who historically live near and depend on natural resources in the newly conserved areas. In the Global South, this has largely meant the rural poor and subsistence communities, which, again, are disproportionately racially or ethnically marginalized (West 2006; Kashwan 2017; Fuentes-​George 2016a; Hochstetler and Keck 2007). The rationale for excluding rural and marginalized people is also tied to their marginalization. Conservation and biodiversity management are certainly technically complex, and rural, low-​income people generally lack the same formally recognized technical training and expertise as university-​educated researchers. This does not mean that the rural marginalized lack environmental knowledge, although it does mean that their knowledge has not been widely recognized as valuable by conservation-​oriented governments (Park et al. 2008). In the post-​1970s, this pattern of exclusionary conservation was so widespread in the Global South that it became known as fortress conservation (Brockington 2002; Sand 2012; West et al. 2008; Peluso 1993). In the mid-​2000s, scholars of conservation, including Mark Dowie and Mac Chapin, publicly pushed conservationist NGOs to be more attentive to the fact that conservation

The Comparative Politics of Environmental Justice    449 could bring serious costs for marginalized people at risk of being dislocated from their land (Dowie 2005; Chapin 2004). Yet, in 2019, there were reports that the conservationist NGO the World Wildlife Federation (WWF) supported governments in Nepal and Cameroon to implement brutal conservationist measures, including shoot-​to-​kill policies, even as these governments systematically engaged in extrajudicial killings and torture in their park management activities (Warren and Baker 2019). The complicity of Westerners in brutal conservation programs is not just a feature of the 2000s, of course. In fact, famed conservationist Dian Fossey referred to Black Rwandans with the racist term “woggiepoos” and, as with the WWF today, is reported to have engaged in torture of suspected poachers (Montgomery 1991; Shoumatoff 1986). This is not to say that conservation programs are necessarily exclusionary. In fact, both Mexico and Jamaica have protected areas at the Parque Nacional de los Arrecifes de Xcalak and the Blue and John Crow Mountains National Park, respectively, that were designed with ground-​up participation from the rural marginalized (Fuentes-​George 2019; 2016a; Kashwan 2017). To be sure, hardline fortress conservation can certainly lead to environmental improvements and saving species. But even if this were sustainable, this kind of hardline conservation is contrary to the goals of environmental justice.

Conclusion: Why Study and Pursue Environmental Justice? Given these challenges, attaining an environmentally just world seems unreachable. Doing so would require addressing the myriad ways in which people have been raced, classed, and otherwise Othered; understanding how these overlap with gender, ethnicity, and culture; and comprehending how all that has been shaped by the particularities of political development in different contexts. Furthermore, it would require ensuring that environmental solutions are crafted with wide participation to avoid the kind of top-​down exclusionary practices that have characterized fortress conservation and similar policies. With such a looming task, it is not surprising that mainstream environmental organizations sometimes treat justice-​based activism as an obstacle to environmentalism, breaking ties with justice-​ oriented organizations in the process (Hadden 2015). However, the trajectory of consumption and development indicates that sustainable environmentalism will only be possible through the pursuit of environmental justice. In the first place, social injustice has driven the environmental catastrophe. For example, the cost of fossil fuels to the privileged has been kept artificially low because governments and corporations have been able to extract these fuels without paying for the social and environmental costs of their extraction. In oil-​exporting countries, when local people protest against pollution and environmental hazards, social marginalization has made it easier for governments to repress, rather than redress their concerns. There are multiple cases where state violence has depressed the cost of extraction among the marginal Other, including among Indigenous people in Ecuador, the Ogoni people in Nigeria, and First Nations people in Canada (Okonkwo 2020; Sawyer 2004). Similarly, the ability of people in the industrialized world to consume electronic goods is facilitated by the fact that many of the

450   Kemi Fuentes-George minerals used in high-​end electronics are mined in places like the Congo, where repressive governments and racialized social stratification have created an underclass that can be used to extract ore cheaply, with little consideration to local environmental or human rights abuses (Eichstaedt 2011; Pellow 2006). These logics are repeated for large-​scale agriculture, as indicated earlier. Thus, it is difficult to meaningfully address crises like climate change, biodiversity loss, land degradation, and resource overconsumption without addressing the social inequities that make those processes so affordable. Second, proponents of environmental solutions need to recognize that environmental mechanisms like conservation need local support to be sustainable. It is certainly possible, at least in the short term, to design environmental policies in a top-​down manner. Furthermore, governments can take the approach of Nepal and Cameroon (among others) and create hardline environmental policies reinforced by the explicit threat of violence in those cases where rural people reject conservation programs. However, functional governments do not have an infinite capacity for violence, and environmental programs without local support are likely to fail (Fuentes-​George 2019, 2016a).

The Way Forward Fortunately, the field of comparative environmental politics indicates that, although difficult, there are pathways for advocates within countries to push for environmental justice. Among some of the success stories of environmental justice globally include the previously mentioned establishment of community-​based protected areas in Mexico, legal personhood over the Whanganui River in New Zealand, resistance to the construction of large dams in India, protection of the Amazon in Brazil, and the creation of a community-​supported World Heritage Site in Jamaica (Khagram 2004; Fuentes-​George 2019; Hochstetler and Keck 2007; Kashwan 2017). While there are no guarantees (and even in these cases, there were setbacks) the success stories all share similar outlines. First, countries need to develop robust mechanisms through which environmental rights can be justiciable. At a minimum, this includes standard measures of democracy, such as voting rights and political representation for minority groups. Although democratization is not synonymous with environmental justice, it is necessary to a just sustainability (Agyeman et al. 2003; Kashwan 2017; Gellars and Jeffords 2018). More importantly, this also includes autonomous and accountable mechanisms specifically oriented around participation in environmental affairs. For example, organizations like FUNAI in Brazil, the Center for Indigenous Rights (CDI) in Mexico, and the Forestry Department in Jamaica (Fuentes-​George 2016a; Kashwan 2017; Hochstetler and Keck 2007)helped marginalized communities get information about proposed land use changes and advocate for local autonomy in the face of these changes. Additional mechanisms to promote and democratize information, like environmental impact assessments (EIAs) and mechanisms for marginalized participation, are essential. To be clear, calling for marginalized participation in policy-​making is a potentially radical action insofar as doing so might challenge the dominant worldview not only of states, but also of formally trained scientists in the environmental movement (Park et al. 2008). As noted earlier, in the discussion of legal personhood, Indigenous and tribal people in

The Comparative Politics of Environmental Justice    451 New Zealand, Ecuador, and Bolivia made the explicit argument that their desired policy was rooted in a conception of the self and nature that was not, to that point, recognized by the modern nation-​state system. Thus, real participation could require changing the value system through which action is evaluated, and, at times, governments and conservationists alike have resisted this call (Schlosberg and Carruthers 2007). Second, it is just as crucial for those interested in studying environmental justice to recognize the transformative potential of alternative worldviews in rethinking what we consider to be an “appropriate” relationship between nature and society. As Neville and Clouthard point out, Indigenous scholars have been writing “for decades” on the effect of “different ontologies of land, environment, development, and sovereignty” on how we understand and live in the natural environment (Neville and Clouthard 2019, p. 3). Nevertheless, in much the same way the mainstream environmental movement has historically overlooked the importance of race and identity in shaping environmentalism (Bullard 2000; Pellow 2006; Mohai et al. 2009), so, too, has the study of comparative environmental politics often failed to recognize the effect of different frameworks and epistemologies (Neville and Clouthard 2019). Third, although globalization may complicate how we understand accountability in environmental injustice, it can provide avenues for globally networked advocates to push recalcitrant governments toward more just sustainability. In cases where governments have been unwilling or unable to create responsive environmental mechanisms for vulnerable people, transnational networks have been occasionally successful at pushing for greater justice. The mechanisms have varied across cases but have included actions like pressing international financial agencies to make access to funds conditional on local justice, promoting informational awareness and mobilization among local communities, or serving as observers to international society (Hochstetler and Keck 2007; Keck and Sikkink 1998; Pellow 2006; Khagram 2004). These tactics have contributed to moments of success, such as the post-​ 1980s mobilization for justice in the Brazilian Amazon and subsequent protection of Indigenous lands, improvements in waste disposal in sub-​Saharan Africa, and restitution for adivasis in India displaced in the construction of dams. Of course, environmentalists also need to ensure that their proposals, particularly around issues of protected areas, are designed with the participation of and respect for marginalized peoples. As Chapin and Dowie have noted, this has not always been easy for conservationist groups to accept, particularly as marginalized groups in general do not have the same kind of access to formally recognized training and education (Dowie 2005; Chapin 2004; Park et al. 2008). Nevertheless, there are enough examples of transnational groups and governments creating conservation programs and other environmental protocols with authoritative participation of marginalized peoples to indicate the possibility of progress toward environmental justice. The many political and social obstacles to an environmentally just world do not preclude that.

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Chapter 24

Critical Perspe c t i v e s on Re presentati on, E qu i t y, and Ri g h ts Developing a Comparative Politics of Environmental Justice Kimberly R. Marion Suiseeya Introduction The study of environmental justice has developed rapidly since its emergence as a movement in the United States in the 1970s. Theories like environmental racism, disproportionate siting, and others have sought to explain why marginalized communities, especially communities of color and low-​income communities in the United States, are more likely to experience environmental harm and lack access to environmental amenities than whiter or wealthier communities (Bullard 1990; Taylor 2014). More recent work has illuminated the racist, colonial origins of land and biodiversity conservation that perpetuates injustice, especially in Indigenous and traditional communities across the globe (Fuentes-​George 2016, this volume; Kashwan 2017, this volume; Pellow, this volume). Other theories, like environmentalism of the poor, focus on the inseparability of environmental conservation from human rights protections to explain injustice in cases where the environment is the source of livelihoods (Martinez-​Alier 2003, 2016). Theoretical work explaining environmental justice as a moral, normative, and legal concept has grown to extend to justice for non-​human species (e.g., ecological justice) and to consider justice at a planetary scale (Dryzek and Pickering 2018). And yet, even with this expansive body of literature, it remains difficult to understand how we might understand the politics of environmental justice in comparative context. For example, to what extent do theories of environmental racism and discriminatory siting help explain environmental justice politics in the Philippines? How applicable are theories like environmentalism of the poor for understanding the politics of environmental justice in the United States (Martinez-​Alier 2014; R. Schroeder et al. 2008)? In this chapter, I aim to

Critical Perspectives on Representation, Equity, and Rights     457 make the case for a comparative politics of environmental justice as one avenue through which we might interrogate environmental politics. The chapter begins by situating these questions within the current practice and knowledge landscapes of environmental justice. It then considers what, if anything, is comparable in environmental justice phenomena. Specifically, I focus on three main tasks. First, I distill insights from the existing corpus of environmental justice work to highlight it as a political phenomenon. Second, I explore how an analytical framework around representation offers a new window into the politics of environmental justice. And third, I suggest avenues for future comparative work on the politics of environmental justice.

What are the Politics of Environmental Justice? What are the “politics of environmental justice,” and what insights can this form of politics generate for understanding politics and environmental governance more broadly? Similar to questions of civil war, democracy, and regime change, questions of environmental justice are rooted in the relationships between states, their citizens, political elites, and economies, resources, and histories (Peluso 1993; Ribot and Peluso 2003). Specialized fields like political ecology and environmental health have established the foundations for demonstrating the empirical basis for the study of environmental justice, identifying socioenvironmental relations as key arenas for engaging in power struggles (Ahlborg and Nightingale 2018; R. Morello-​Frosch et al. 2001; Pastor et al. 2005; Robbins 2012; Svarstad and Benjaminsen 2020). Environmental ethicists have developed theoretical foundations for approaching environmental justice through consequentialist or deontological lenses, introducing diverse moral frameworks that could guide human and political action (Perrett 1998; Shrader-​ Frechette 2002; Vickery and Hunter 2016). Political theorists have integrated ideas of environmental justice into theories of the “green state” to help explain the motivation for and forms of environmentality that emerge in different contexts (Agrawal 2005; Eckersley 1996, 2004). The range of disciplines and contributions to the study and practice of environmental justice are both deep and expanding—​too much to cover in this chapter. Additionally, other comprehensive works that explore and synthesize the breadth of multidisciplinary developments around environmental justice take on this task (Mohai et al. 2009). As a discipline, political science has largely overlooked environmental justice as an area of inquiry, viewing it more as a social or humanistic concern rather than a broader political phenomenon. Yet environmental justice is very much rooted in state formation and expression, obligation, and consent, and the evolution of systems of representation—​the “stuff ” of politics. Similarly, with important exceptions, political science has historically overlooked so-​called marginalized actors, or those communities who have less visible power relationships within more dominant political institutions, in part because these institutions themselves have sought to erase these marginalized communities (Michener 2018; Prowse et al. 2020; Scott 1977; Thurston 2018; Wilmer 2016). Alternatively, some researchers focus on actors as given entities and do not problematize how these actors come to be powerful in different policy arenas (Ferguson 2016). The 1964 Wilderness Act

458    Kimberly R. Marion Suiseeya in the United States, for example, defines wilderness as “an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.”1 In doing so, this institution seeks to erase the Indigenous Peoples, histories, lands, and their relations that have been caretakers of these areas for millennia and thereby marginalize their claims and authority (Taylor 2016). When researchers only study what these institutions make visible to us, rather than also considering what these institutions seek to make invisible and which actors engage in such struggles of representation, we overlook critical dynamics that can help us better explain the production of justice and injustice (Marion Suiseeya et al. 2021). The politics of environmental justice provide an avenue for overcoming these analytical blinders. These politics concern how the dynamics of inequality—​social, political, and economic—​shape struggles around human–​environment relationships. This includes, for example, how power dynamics shape negotiations of science, knowledge, risk, uncertainty, and, critically, identity in governance systems responding to environmental change. In this sense, environmental justice is not solely a phenomenon produced through environmental politics but rather is a distinct form of politics that attends to the ways in which justice dynamics pattern experiences of environmental governance; environmental justice and injustice provide important context for understanding the contours of political life. At the same time, however, conceptual fragmentation about who the political subjects in environmental justice are, what environmental justice is, how we might study it, when environmental justice concerns emerge, and where comparisons are appropriate continues to increase the complexity of the conceptual landscape around environmental justice.

Environmental Justice as a Movement Historically, environmental justice studies take environmental justice movements—​and thus environmental injustices—​as their starting point. Protests against the Warren County polychlorinated biphenyl (PCB) landfill in North Carolina, for example, prompted both the emergence of a broader environmental justice movement as well as a research agenda that spans multiple disciplines (Bullard 1993; Murdock 2020). Emerging on the heels of the civil rights movement in the United States, the early environmental justice movement drew attention to the political forces, such as disenfranchisement, that rendered black communities more likely than white communities to experience exposure to toxic waste. As similar movements spread across the United States, the political violence of environmental injustices became abundantly clear: environmental governance driven by racism and white supremacy functioned to disenfranchise black communities both politically and economically (Pulido 1996, 2017). In environmental justice communities outside the United States, such as in the Philippines, Kenya, and Brazil, communities similarly experience environmental degradation, loss, and harm driven by larger political and economic forces that similarly enact political violence in these communities. Instead of the bodily assaults experienced by communities like those in Warren County, these movements have emerged as communities fight against livelihood assaults from large-​scale developments like hydroelectric dams and mines that destroy their environment and often result in land loss (Zanotti 2016).

Critical Perspectives on Representation, Equity, and Rights     459 Environmental justice scholars follow these conflicts to document and memorialize them as well as to demonstrate the unintended, negative social consequences of a changing environment (Scheidel et al. 2020; Temper et al. 2015; Temper et al. 2018). Such negative impacts can include long-​term health effects, household livelihood impacts, rights infringement, cultural loss, land theft, resettlement, assaults on sovereignty, and existential crises, among others (Fernández-​Llamazares et al. 2020; R. A. Morello-​Frosch 2002; Sikor 2013; Whyte 2014). Yet, as the rich body of work on environmental justice demonstrates, both the causes and consequences of environmental injustice vary by the specific context. How and why communities experience injustice in Warren County is different from how communities in the Navajo Nation or the upland forests of Laos experience injustice. As scholars have sought to pinpoint a “global environmental justice movement,” however, they have shown that while most environmental justice conflicts are local, the movement is global in two ways: first, many categories or types of conflicts are found throughout the world, even as their specifics vary; and, second activists work through their networks to build connections and support across movements (Martínez-​Alier et al. 2016). In empirical studies seeking to explain environmental justice, researchers often focus analytical attention on environmental justice communities as the unit of analysis for observing a specific conflict. Most commonly, scholars first consider the demographic characteristics of communities experiencing environmental degradation, deprivation, repression, destruction, or loss and their proximity to sites of waste and pollution generation (Mohai and Saha 2015). Finding that race and class correlate with spatial proximity to sources of pollution, a significant portion of the literature examines the distributive dimensions of environmental justice. For example, researchers have shown that in the United States the spatial patterns of proximity correlate with at least one demographic characteristic—​race, ethnicity, class, and so on—​to explain why some communities disproportionately experience environmental injustice (Bell and Ebisu 2012; Chakraborty et al. 2011; Flacke et al. 2016). In the United States, for example, black communities face systemic environmental racism that leads to disproportionate exposure to toxic pollutants, and lower income communities have fewer environmental amenities like parks and green spaces than do more affluent neighborhoods (Anguelovski 2014; Curran and Hamilton 2012; Eckerd and Keeler 2012). Others have shown that economic development pressures drive environmental injustice (Martinez-​Alier et al. 2016). In Laos, poverty alleviation and economic development priorities have driven the rapid expansion of hydroelectric power projects that force relocation of thousands of people (Goldman 2006). This research on the distributive dimensions of environmental justice has illustrated the myriad ways in which environmental goods, harms, costs, and benefits are patterned disproportionately among different communities (see Figure 24.1). Answers to the question, “who are the political subjects of environmental justice claims and practices?” have expanded along geographic, jurisdictional, and temporal scales, as well as along issue area lines. No longer limited to racially and/​or economically defined urban communities disproportionately exposed to pollution, environmental justice as movement and as scholarship has extended these communities to include diverse geographies across urban–​rural gradients, island communities, isolated communities, nomadic peoples, and non-​human communities (Holland and Linch 2016; Schlosberg 2007, 2013). These include past, current, and future communities that transcend local jurisdictions to include transnational and global levels and that experience environmental injustices related to air, climate change, food, biodiversity, land, water, and energy governance. Numerous handbooks and

460    Kimberly R. Marion Suiseeya reviews have charted this expansion over time (Coolsaet 2020; Holifield et al. 2017). Critical for this chapter, however, is centering these communities not as victims, but as political subjects uniquely situated to generate insights into environmental justice as a political, not only social, phenomenon. Not purely descriptive in nature, this case-​based approach to examining environmental justice movements has stimulated theoretical development to identify the drivers of environmental injustice. This includes theories that explain, for example, the siting and operations of noxious facilities as driven by limited political representation, discriminatory siting practices, and environmental racism (Taylor 2014). Although environmental justice research is most commonly case-​based, more recently scholar-​activists have begun assembling these cases into large datasets, like the Environmental Justice (EJ) Atlas (www.ejat​las.org), to facilitate broader comparative inquiries (Temper et al. 2018). For example, Scheidel et al. (2020) recently used the EJ Atlas to identify what makes environmental justice movements successful. This research demonstrates how “statistical political ecology” can generate comparative insights to inform broader pursuits of justice by focusing on the characteristics of the groups involved, the actions they take, and the strategies they pursue, such as legal, preventative, and diversification strategies. And although there is growing consensus that environmental justice movements are linked through such conflict typologies and networks, examinations of the politics of environmental justice remain underdeveloped. Yet, as Gordon Walker notes, “environmental justice activists clearly know that in practice making change happen is about politics, often fighting tooth and nail and challenging the way that power is exercised” (2012, p. 219). Environmental justice movements bring these politics into sharp relief by showing how the strategic interplay of three elements of environmental justice claims—​normative (how things ought to be), descriptive (how things are), and explanatory (why things are how they are)—​play out (Walker 2012, p. 40).

Environmental Justice as Contested Concepts Environmental justice research has an implicit normative commitment to justice. Yet the question “what is environmental justice?” remains a central area of inquiry that links two primary debates: first, what is the scope of environmental justice, and, second, how might we operationalize environmental justice for policy-​making and practice? To the first question of scope, decades of research has expanded the study of environmental justice to include the socio-​political dynamics surrounding relationships to and governance and values of environmental amenities, such as biodiversity, clean air and water, and disamenities, such as pollution, soil degradation, and waste (Anguelovski and Martínez-​ Alier 2014; Eckerd et al. 2017; Pickren 2014). Environmental justice also includes more specialized concerns around climate justice, food justice, epistemic justice, energy justice, and disaster resilience (Ciplet et al. 2015; Fainstein 2015; Reames 2016; Sovacool and Dworkin 2014; Temper and Del Bene 2016; Van Hecken et al. 2015). The scope of environmental justice is thus quite broad and can include a range of issues that link human and social well-​being to the environment. Rather than diluting the salience of environmental justice,

Critical Perspectives on Representation, Equity, and Rights     461 however, this broad scope forces attention to the myriad possibilities in which the politics of environmental justice play out. The second question of operationalization focuses attention on what qualifies as environmental justice. Early works point primarily to a distributive conceptualization of justice that prompted the birth of the environmental justice movement and shaped the development of early environmental justice literature (Walker 2009). Distributive justice focuses on the distribution of benefits and harms associated with environmental degradation, conservation, and preservation and takes as its starting point the lived experiences of communities (Kaswan 2020). More recently theoretical developments in environmental justice literature have suggested moving beyond a univalent, distributive understanding of environmental justice to a multivalent understanding that highlights the importance of its procedural and recognitional dimensions (Schlosberg 2004). Procedural justice refers to how different groups access and influence the procedures, practices, and outcomes of decision-​making processes (Bell and Carrick 2017; Marion Suiseeya 2020). Recognition refers to how the patterns of representation, interpretation, and communication impact different groups’ abilities to shape, participate in, and benefit from decision-​making processes (Martin et al. 2016). Environmental justice scholars now broadly adopt this trivalent approach (see Figure 24.1), although debates about the relationships within and among these multiple dimensions stimulate ongoing inquiries in order to better articulate possible pathways toward justice. As environmental justice research has expanded, scholars have examined the principles and norms that underlie policies and their implementation in an effort to help explain their justice impacts. This work includes, for example, asking questions about the principles embedded in environmental policies such as equal, needs-​based, or exchange-​based principles for determining access to environmental amenities like green spaces or for determining exposure to environmental disamenities like air pollution or toxic waste (Okereke and Dooley 2010; Pasgaard and Dawson 2019; Pellow 2004; Schroeder 2009; Schroeder and Pogge 2009). It also includes asking questions about principles like transparency, diversity, inclusion, equity, and sovereignty, among others, for designing decision-​making processes, co-​ producing knowledge, and facilitating engagement with different groups (Marion

Multimensional Justice Procedural How the procedures, practices, and outcomes of decision-making processes impact how different groups access and influence governance

Distributional How the distribution of benefits and harms associated with environmental degradation, conservation, and preservation shape lived experiences

Recognitional How patterns of representation, interpretation, and communication impact different groups’ abilities to shape, participate in, and benefit from decision-making processes

Justice as aspirational relationships

Figure 24.1  Multidimensional justice. Source: Author

462    Kimberly R. Marion Suiseeya Suiseeya 2015, 2017). Finally, scholars have developed a variety of frameworks centered on capabilities and equity that aim to provide a conceptual toolkit for developing environmental policies (McDermott et al. 2013). Still others have sought to bring environmental justice research into conversation with decolonial, degrowth, sustainability, and deontological theories to illuminate the synergies and tensions for producing and explaining environmental justice and injustice. Pellow (2020), for example, identifies a critical environmental justice framework centered on four pillars: (1) environmental justice communities experience multiple forms of inequalities and their intersections, not just racial and economic inequalities; (2) environmental justice manifests within and across multiple scales; (3) environmental justice demands attention and contestation to power and power structures; and, (4) environmental justice communities (including their bodies, populations, and spaces) are indispensable for securing just futures. Much of contemporary debate around concepts of environmental justice centers on the operationalization of justice: How might we meaningfully define justice in practice? Addressing this question is important for scholarly and practical reasons. Because environmental justice literature is dominated by work that is critical—​of scholars, of policy makers, and practice—​readers do not always perceive it to offer constructive and practical alternatives. Instead, the message from environmental justice research may resonate as a binary choice: we can choose a world free of all injustices, or we resign ourselves to injustice. Thus, even when there is incremental progress, such as improved air quality, the persistence of injustice can overshadow the gains. Operationalizing justice can help resist this perfection trap that could sacrifice progress at the expense of justice by drawing attention to its multivalent, plural, and dynamic nature. There are a variety of ways to scope the debates here, such as based on issue area like climate change, food, energy, land, and so on. Of particular relevance for exploring the politics of environmental justice are debates around equity, rights, and participation. Referring to the relative social conditions of different groups, equity is often used interchangeably with justice. Similar to justice, equity is multivalent and includes distributive, procedural, and contextual dimensions of governance (McDermott et al. 2013). And, similar to justice, what counts as equity, who counts when evaluating equity, establishing equity goals (e.g., why equity), and the processes by which the parameters of equity are set are all critical for advancing equity (McDermott et al. 2013, p. 420). Because of these similarities, some scholars and practitioners adopt the term “equity” because it is less political and thus more palatable to decision-​makers. Collapsing equity and justice into the same concept, however, critically neglects the distributive and comparative foundations of equity as a concept. Equity is concerned with comparing the experiences of different groups to determine the extent to which the groups had similar opportunity relative to their circumstances (Ikeme 2003). Equity, in prioritizing distribution and materiality as the lenses through which to determine what is just, obscures alternative worldviews that prioritize relationships or identities as the lens through which to orient human activity. In this sense, equity may unnecessarily limit justice possibilities to those based on a distribution of access or resources. Equity is thus best approached as one potential way of evaluating outcomes but should not be considered the primary measure of justice. In contrast to the relative nature of equity, rights—​the rules about what people are entitled to—​are, in an academic sense, absolute. Individuals and communities either have, or do not have, rights. In the context of the environment, rights can extend to humans

Critical Perspectives on Representation, Equity, and Rights     463 and non-​humans. Movements to grant rights to nature, for example, have gained momentum in the past decade, most notably with the establishment of the Whanganui River’s rights in New Zealand (Gellers 2017). For humans and human communities, rights may include material rights, such as land or property; procedural rights, such as due process and civil rights; and corporeal or existence rights, such as human, cultural, and religious rights, or rights to clean air and water, for example (see Gellers and Jeffords this volume). Debates circulating at the intersection of rights and justice interrogate the extent to which rights are a meaningful expression of justice; rights must also be implemented, monitored, complied with, and enforced. Some scholars suggest that securing rights is a, perhaps the, primary pathway toward justice, while others point to the inadequacy of rights as a tool for justice, especially when the exercise of certain rights comes at the expense of justice. The central critique here emerges especially in relation to communities and peoples whose rights to self-​determination (e.g., Indigenous Peoples) are assaulted even as they seek to exercise other rights that require their consent to be governed by the state (Marion Suiseeya et al. 2021). Finally, debates on participation as a mechanism for redressing justice concerns have been a central feature in environmental politics for decades yet the persistent tendency among scholars and practitioners to sometimes uncritically engage participation is an ongoing concern. Participation can, as many scholars argue, have positive impacts by democratizing governance (Holland 2017). But it is not a panacea. In the absence of consideration of the politics that shape decision-​making processes, for example, participation can further entrench injustice when participation is only meaningful for those seeking legitimation of predetermined decisions (Marion Suiseeya 2020). In this chapter, I don’t seek to litigate these debates, but point to the contestations over these concepts as potential anchors for examining environmental justice politics. As the chapter thus far demonstrates, answers to the question, “what is environmental justice?” remain contested. And yet it is precisely this contestation that is important, if not critical, for pursuing environmental justice. At its core, environmental justice is not a particular outcome or meaning, but an aspiration that reflects and represents core individual and collective values about what ought to be. Justice is an ongoing, principled pursuit to shape the practices and processes through which relationships emerge and evolve that is realized through its pursuit—​not at its end. As research in environmental justice becomes more conceptually complex, it also becomes more difficult to see how we might understand environmental justice in comparative contexts, particularly when the analytical focus centers on injustice as an outcome rather than a driver of environmental politics. Yet, for scholars of comparative environmental politics, the promise of this extensive body of work is how it illuminates the causes and consequences of environmental change and responses to it. Common across these studies are ideas about the role of agency, identity, socio-​ecological systems, scale, and power that, if critically engaged as Pellow argues, can help us redefine environmental justice (Pellow 2016). Combined, the body of work that constitutes environmental justice scholarship has become increasingly complex and stretched our conceptual imagination, providing an as-​yet untapped opportunity to better grasp the critical experiential elements that shape environmental (in)justice. Shifting toward a comparative politics of environmental justice focused on representation, discussed next, provides one avenue for realizing a more critical form of environmental justice scholarship.

464    Kimberly R. Marion Suiseeya

Toward a Comparative Politics of Environmental Justice Examining environmental justice as a political, rather than simply a social, phenomenon requires that we begin our empirical inquiries with a commitment to observing the actors and issues that some actors try to erase or make less visible through their various power relationships. As the brief overview of environmental justice literature presented earlier in this chapter highlights, the politics of environmental justice manifest in myriad ways beyond those observed on the surface. They emerge through the ways in which the problems of environmental justice are defined and made more or less salient in policy arenas, through the presumption of unified and universal commitments to particular values frames, and through the ways in which researchers, policy-​makers, communities, and activists ask questions in order to generate and share knowledge. To overcome these biases, a growing body of work seeks to reorient how we study power by centering analyses on the margins through bottom-​up and decolonial approaches that unmoor the center’s grip on how and where scholars locate power in their analyses (Lightfoot 2016; Marion Suiseeya and Zanotti 2019; Michener 2020). Here, comparative politics has a lot to offer critical environmental justice studies. Although often referring to methodological tools of comparison that could be employed to understand environmental justice policies and outcomes, the foundations of comparative politics as a subfield in political science focus more on the conceptual basis of comparison. That is, what are the theoretical concepts and innovations around which empirical environmental justice studies can be organized to help us better understand environmental (and other) politics? This approach asks: What is comparable, and what can comparison tell us about environmental justice? Questions about, for example, the effects of regime change on the distribution of environmental harm or how democratic practices impact environmental conditions, are both puzzling questions in environmental justice research and also shed light on pressing comparative politics concerns. In some ways this approach merges the everyday politics of the environment and the everyday experiences of environmental governance with more traditional examinations of why states pursue the environmental policies they do and what are the results of these policies. This shift resituates environmental justice from being the end goal or outcomes of environmental politics and policy toward a framework through which to analyze and approach environmental governance across multiple scales. Environmental justice becomes ontology, not solely an outcome or unit of analysis. Examining environmental justice as a political phenomenon, thus, requires two related analytical maneuvers: first, we must conceptualize justice as both contested and relational—​ that is, there is no uniform or universal understanding of justice that can be assumed—​and that justice is a phenomenon produced through interactions with others. Second, we must resituate environmental justice in our analytical frameworks from being the outcome variable of interest to a driver of environmental politics. These coupled maneuvers open new windows for comparison by focusing attention on how the politics of environmental justice impact environmental governance processes and outcomes. One approach for advancing a comparative politics of environmental justice is through an analytical framework focused on representation.

Critical Perspectives on Representation, Equity, and Rights     465

Environmental Justice as a Politics of Representation In broad terms, representation is the practice of making something visible (Marion Suiseeya and Zanotti 2019; Pitkin 1967). This includes things like ideas, interests, places, groups, peoples, histories, and species, among others. A common area of inquiry in comparative politics, the concept of representation provides a useful analytical lens for examining the politics of environmental justice: it transitions from a focus on questions of what produces environmental injustice to posing questions of whose ideas of justice gain and lose traction, how, why, and with what effects. It can illuminate how different forms, systems, and modes of representation impact how environmental problems, science, knowledge, uncertainty, and risk are defined, negotiated, and ultimately shape how different communities experience environmental governance (Whyte 2014; Whyte et al. 2016). Moreover, these types of questions lend themselves to comparative analysis across multiple scales of governance for understanding how the politics of environmental justice impact the contours of political life in various other contexts. To explore this approach in practice, consider the following two distinct sites of environmental justice claim-​making: the Ninth Asia-​Europe Peoples Forum (AEPF) and the Sixth World Parks Congress (WPC). The AEPF took place in October 2012, in Vientiane, Laos. Running parallel to the Asia-​Europe Meeting, a high-​level ministerial meeting that seeks to deepen relationships as a way to help balance global world order, the biennial AEPF event brings together civil society organizations from across Asia and Europe to “open new political spaces for influence.”2 The theme of AEPF was “People’s Solidarity Against Poverty and for Sustainable Development: Challenging Unjust and Unequal Development, Building States of Citizens for Citizens.” For 4 days, more than 1,000 civil society representatives and citizens from around the Asia-​Pacific region and Europe gathered to discuss four major themes: social protection, food sovereignty and sustainable land and natural resource management, sustainable energy, and just work and sustainable livelihoods. I attended these events as part of a larger research project in which I conducted interviews and surveys and collected ethnographic data through participant observation between 2007 and 2016 to explore justice and global forest governance. In the months leading up to the AEPF, civil society in Laos was becoming stronger due in part to new national legislation that allowed for the formation and operation of national-​ level nonprofit associations. Up until early 2012, aside from mass organizations like the Lao National Front and the Lao Women’s Union that operate as arms of the state, the functions of civil society were performed primarily by international nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) like the Wildlife Conservation Society and World Wildlife Federation (WWF), among many others. At the same time, neighboring Cambodia was experiencing a surge of violent crackdowns on its vibrant civil society organizations and community activists. This violence included the state-​sponsored killing of prominent environmental activist Chhut Wutthy for documenting illegal logging and the death of 14-​year old Heng Chantha, a girl killed by security forces attacking a protest against land grabbing in her village.3 In 2014, the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) held its decennial World Parks Congress in Sydney, Australia. This is typically a 2-​week long event in which

466    Kimberly R. Marion Suiseeya representatives from governments, research organizations, NGOs, international organizations, communities, foundations, and businesses gather to set the agenda and priorities for protected area policy and governance for the following decade. Although not a government policy-​making body, the unique structure of the IUCN and its congresses have provided an important platform for developing and sharing policy innovations that often make their way into national-​level policies and international treaty-​making bodies (Brosius 2004). The theme of the 2014 WPC, “Parks, People, Planet: Inspiring Solutions,” reflected the IUCN’s desire to better articulate a more holistic vision of conservation across multiple scales of governance, from communities through to the global level. Since its 1975 commitment to respecting the rights of Indigenous Peoples, the IUCN’s practices to exercise this commitment fluctuated: estimates of Indigenous Peoples and local communities displaced through the establishment of national parks and protected areas reach upward of 200 million people (Agrawal and Redford 2009; Brockington and Igoe 2006). As parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity sought to ramp up their commitments to biodiversity conservation articulated in the 2010 Aichi Targets, alongside the growing economic pressures leading to large-​scale land grabbing, Indigenous Peoples and local communities increasingly confronted violent displacement and sometimes death when trying to exercise their rights under domestic and international law. In 2014, the human rights organization, Global Witness, released one of many annual Deadly Environment reports documenting the disappearances and murders of 116 land defenders in 17 countries—​more than double the number of journalists killed in the same year (Global Witness 2015). Against the backdrop of increasing violence against environmental defenders, it was not surprising that justice was on the agenda at both the AEPF and WPC. Recognizing the importance of grappling with environmental injustice for more effective governance, both events hosted numerous sessions on equity, justice, and rights in which community activists, leaders, civil society, and Indigenous Peoples organizations participated. Hosts of these sessions ranged from international governmental organizations like the World Bank to NGOs like Conservation International and civil society organizations like Natural Justice and the Indian Law Center, among others. Victoria Tauli-​Corpuz, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, was in attendance at the WPC, helping to launch the new Land Rights Now! campaign, alongside advancing other Indigenous rights agendas. Sombath Somphone, a well-​known civic leader in Laos, had worked to help shape AEPF as an important site for advancing citizen-​led ideas and dialogues.4 At both events, researchers from academia and think tanks, graduate students, and policy advisors, including myself, circulated through the event to bear witness to the environmental injustices shared by different communities and participate in discussions and workshops advocating policy solutions. Approached through a traditional environmental justice framework, researchers often center analytical focus on the characteristics of the groups making environmental justice claims, including their demographics, geography, and environment. Analyses of these two cases would point to the marginalized status of these groups: Indigenous communities and poor, rural communities who, by virtue of proximity to and relationships with valuable forest and land resources, are disproportionately vulnerable to environmental change, including altered or lost access to forests and land (Forsyth and Sikor 2013). Through such an analysis, researchers can compare the sources and forms of inequality that those communities experience, such as discrimination, for example. This approach is important

Critical Perspectives on Representation, Equity, and Rights     467 for documenting how these particular communities experience injustices. Yet this approach does little to illuminate the politics that drive these experiences. Such analyses can lead to assumptions that improved, more secure livelihoods would be sufficient for redressing justice concerns—​an implication commonly suggested in existing research (Angelsen et al. 2012; Lawlor et al. 2010). Approaching these sites of environmental justice claim-​making through the lens of representation, however, focuses attention on whose ideas of justice gain and lose traction (normative), how and why (explanatory), and with what effects (descriptive). This means examining environmental justice claim-​making by interrogating the interplay between the normative, descriptive, and explanatory elements of claim-​making, as well as the conflicts within each of these elements. It begins by identifying the ideas, worldviews, and visions that circulate in different communities and venues, examining how these are made visible, and exploring the implications. At both the AEPF and WPC, for example, different participants pointed to the political violence expressed through state-​led discourses of “development,” “climate solutions,” and “protecting global commons.” In one session on sustainable land management at AEPF, for example, audience members called out their governments’ enthusiastic embrace of Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation (REDD+​) programs as internationally sanctioned land grabs.5 Similarly, at the WPC, Indigenous participants pointed to the ways in which REDD+​undermined their land rights and threatened their very existence.6 Although programs like REDD+​can be understood as generally “good” ideas that can help alleviate poverty and support alternative livelihoods, for some, these state-​led discourses represent mechanisms through which governments can potentially displace and disenfranchise particular constituencies. Thus, while some groups understand environmental governance challenges in less developed nation-​states as ones of poverty and livelihoods, other groups view these as problems of power, representation, and self-​determination. The environmental justice claim-​making that took place at both events demonstrated the importance of representation for understanding environmental justice. At the WPC, for example, Indigenous representatives called out NGO representatives for restricting pursuits of justice to rights and not tackling the power relationships that undermine both the realization of rights and the pursuit of self-​determination (Marion Suiseeya et al. forthcoming). In one session on Indigenous and local community land rights, for example, Indigenous Peoples’ representatives discussed the importance of sovereignty, human rights, land tenure security, and self-​determination for justice.7 As the session proceeded, it became abundantly clear that all of these elements operate in tandem to advance pursuits of justice. One Indigenous woman captured this sentiment; she said that even though “rights are not negotiable, we are still struggling against invisibility.”8 Her comment prompted another participant to talk about how rights-​based conservation efforts are “overly fixated on full tenure” at the expense of recognition of traditional governance systems.9 As the discussion unfolded, more and more participants pointed to the need for transformative processes that allow alternative governance arrangements and ways of being to flourish. This was not something that NGOs were pursuing because they were working within the constraints of the existing legal systems; as one NGO representative said, “the law is to blame.”10 This discussion points to the politics of environmental justice that shape environmental governance. Debates over the appropriate institutional solutions, such as formal land tenure versus traditional governance arrangements, reveal conceptual fragmentation

468    Kimberly R. Marion Suiseeya about what environmental justice is. Attention to who pursues these different solutions, at what venues, and toward what ends suggests that attending to who the political subjects are, when environmental justice concerns emerge, and how these concerns are articulated shows the importance of questioning representation in various venues. For example, while NGOs have historically acted as a proxy representative for Indigenous communities in global policy-​making venues, this should not necessarily be interpreted as a substitute for other forms of representation. NGOs, like government agencies, communities, businesses, and Indigenous Peoples, operate within particular institutional structures. Their engagement in these structures may reflect acceptance of those institutions, even as communities they ally with do not. Thus, beginning empirical inquiries into environmental justice through attention to representation—​what ideas gain or lose traction, how, why, and with what effects—​can reveal its politics. When approached in comparative perspective, these inquiries can reveal more about the landscape of justice possibilities than can demographics alone.

Conclusion I began this chapter aiming to make a case for environmental justice as a driver, rather than outcome, of environmental governance. This approach contrasts with dominant approaches that orient questions around how and why governments take on certain environmental governance to explain their effects. Critical environmental justice studies question the underlying assumptions about what justice is (Pellow 2016). Yet the majority of environmental justice studies approach environmental justice through a set of assumptions about what justice is (largely by identifying injustices), which leads to assumptions about what is comparable across contexts (e.g., populations, political structures, etc.). These approaches assume that the environmental justice movement itself identifies the key variables of interest. Such an approach provides momentum for reactive approaches to environmental justice that assume some consensus on what environmental justice is (i.e., that the policies adopted are somehow environmental justice policies) (Forsyth and Levidow 2015). This results in calls for specific types of solutions like transparency and inclusion while also neglecting the meaning-​making processes that make up what justice is. In effect, this results in an inevitability of injustices that are otherwise remediable. Part of the analytical maneuver advocated here requires situating environmental justice as a particular form of politics that, in the production of environmental governance, can seek to erase certain pursuits of justice while elevating others. The key analytical questions to pose when examining environmental justice, thus, are what is made visible, how, and by whom. Further questions about what isn’t made visible, in what context, and why can help generate deeper insights into environmental justice as a political phenomenon. A comparative politics of environmental justice can reveal new insights into the ways that institutions and governance actors structure justice possibilities. It can help generate recognition that justice itself is not comparable as a variable because justice itself is a contested and relational concept and thus a central concept around which environmental politics plays out. The politics of environmental justice are foundational to the practice of environmental governance.

Critical Perspectives on Representation, Equity, and Rights     469 In redirecting attention to justice as politics, scholars of environmental justice, comparative environmental politics, and environmental governance more broadly can be better positioned to understand what justice demands.

Notes 1. Wilderness Act of September 3, 1964 (P.L. 88-​577, 78 Stat. 890 as amended; 16 U.S.C. 1131(note), 1131–​1136). 2. Asia-​Europe Ministerial Forum; 9th Asia-​Europe Peoples Forum “Call for Participants.” 3. 2013 Human Rights Watch Report, Cambodia. 4. Shortly after the AEPF concluded, Sombath Somphone disappeared. Until now, he hasn’t been found, despite video footage showing him being taken from his vehicle at a police booth in Vientiane, Laos. Assumed to be an enforced disappearance, civil society leaders in Laos assume his disappearance was prompted by the success of the AEPF and other civil society developments. 5. Author Field Notes, October 16, 2012. 6. Author Field Notes, November 17, 2014. 7. Author Field Notes, November 15, 2014. 8. Ibid. 9. Ibid. 10. Ibid.

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472    Kimberly R. Marion Suiseeya Martínez-​Alier, Joan, Leah Temper, Daniela Del Bene, et al. “Is There a Global Environmental Justice Movement?” Journal of Peasant Studies 43, no. 3 (2016): 731–​755. McDermott, Melanie, Sango Mahanty, and Kate Schreckenberg. “Examining Equity: A Multidimensional Framework for Assessing Equity in Payments for Ecosystem Services.” Environmental Science & Policy 33 (2013): 416–​427. Michener, Jamila. Fragmented Democracy: Medicaid, Federalism, and Unequal Politics New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Michener, Jamila. “Power from the Margins: Grassroots Mobilization and Urban Expansions of Civil Legal Rights.” Urban Affairs Review 56, no. 5 (2020): 1390–​1422. Mohai, Paul, David Pellow, and J. Timmons Roberts. “Environmental Justice.” Annual Review of Environment and Resources 34, no. 1 (2009): 405–​430. Mohai, Paul, and Robin Saha. “Which Came First, People or Pollution? a Review of Theory and Evidence from Longitudinal Environmental Justice Studies.” Environmental Research Letters 10 no. 12 (2015): 125011. Morello-​Frosch, Rachel A. “Discrimination and the Political Economy of Environmental Inequality.” Environment and Planning C: Government and Policy 20, no. 4 (2002): 477–​496. Morello-​Frosch, Rachel, Manuel Pastor, and James Sadd. “Environmental Justice and Southern California’s “Riskscape”: The Distribution of Air Toxics Exposures and Health Risks Among Diverse Communities.” Urban Affairs Review 36, no. 4 (2001): 551–​578. Murdock, Esme G. “A History of Environmental Justice: Foundations, Narratives, and Perspectives.” In Environmental Justice: Key Issues, edited by Brendan Coolsaet, 6–​17. Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2020. Okereke, Chukwumerije, and Kate Dooley. “Principles of Justice in Proposals and Policy Approaches to Avoided Deforestation: Towards a Post-​Kyoto Climate Agreement.” Global Environmental Change 20 (2010): 82–​95. Pasgaard, Maya, and Neil Dawson. “Looking Beyond Justice as Universal Basic Needs Is Essential to Progress Towards ‘Safe and Just Operating Spaces.’ ” Earth System Governance 2 (2019): 100030. Pastor Jr, Manuel, Rachel Morello-​Frosch, and James L. Sadd. “The Air Is Always Cleaner on the Other Side: Race, Space, and Ambient Air Toxics Exposures in California.” Journal of Urban Affairs 27, no. 2 (2005): 127–​148. Pellow, David N. Garbage Wars: The Struggle for Environmental Justice in Chicago. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004. Pellow, David N. “Toward a Critical Environmental Justice Studies.” Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race 13, no. 2 (2016): 221–​236. Pellow, David N. “Critical Environmental Justice Studies.” In Environmental Justice: Key Issues, edited by Brendan Coolsaet, 293–​302. New York: Earthscan from Routledge, 2020. Peluso, Nancy Lee. “Coercing Conservation: The Politics of State Resource Control.” Global Environmental Change 3, no. 2 (1993): 199–​217. Perrett, Roy W. “Indigenous Rights and Environmental Justice.” Environmental Ethics 20, no. 4 (1998): 377–​391. Pickren, Graham. “Political Ecologies of Electronic Waste: Uncertainty and Legitimacy in the Governance of E-​Waste Geographies.” Environment and Planning a 46, no. 1 (2014): 26–​45. Pitkin, Hanna Fenichel. The Concept of Representation. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1967. Prowse, Gwen, Vesla M. Weaver, and Tracey L. Meares. “The State from Below: Distorted Responsiveness in Policed Communities.” Urban Affairs Review 56, no. 5 (2020): 1423–​1471.

Critical Perspectives on Representation, Equity, and Rights     473 Pulido, Laura. Environmentalism and Economic Justice: Two Chicano Struggles in the Southwest. 3rd edn. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1996. Pulido, Laura. “Historicizing the Personal and the Political: Evolving Racial Formations and the Environmental Justice Movement.” In The Routledge Handbook of Environmental Justice, edited by Ryan Holifield, Jayajit Chakraborty, and Gordon Walker, 15–​24. Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2017. Reames, Tony Gerard. “Targeting Energy Justice: Exploring Spatial, Racial/​ Ethnic and Socioeconomic Disparities in Urban Residential Heating Energy Efficiency.” Energy Policy 97 (2016): 549–​558. Ribot, Jesse C., and Nancy Lee Peluso. “A Theory of Access.” Rural Sociology, 68, no. 2 (2003): 153–​181. Robbins, Paul. Political Ecology: A Critical Introduction. 2nd edn. West Sussex, UK: John Wiley & Sons, 2012. Scheidel, Arnim, Daniela Del Bene, Juan Liu, et al. “Environmental Conflicts and Defenders: A Global Overview.” Global Environmental Change 63 (2020): 102104. Schlosberg, David. “Reconceiving Environmental Justice: Global Movements and Political Theories.” Environmental Politics 13, no. 3 (2004): 517–​540. Schlosberg, David. Defining Environmental Justice: Theories, Movements and Nature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Schlosberg, David. “Theorising Environmental Justice: The Expanding Sphere of a Discourse.” Environmental Politics 22, no. 1 (2013): 37–​55. Schroeder, Doris. “Justice and Benefit Sharing.” In Indigenous Peoples, Consent and Benefit Sharing: Lessons from the San-​Hoodia Case, edited by Rachel Wynberg, Doris Schroeder, and Roger Chennells, 396. London: Springer, 2009. Schroeder, Doris, and Thomas Pogge. “Justice and the Convention on Biological Diversity.” Ethics & International Affairs 23, no. 3 (2009): 267–​280. Schroeder, Richard, Kevin St Martin, Bradley Wilson, et al. “Third World Environmental Justice.” Society and Natural Resources 21, no. 7 (2008): 547–​555. Scott, James C. The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast Asia. London: Yale University Press, 1977. Shrader-​Frechette, Kristin. Environmental Justice: Creating Equality, Reclaiming Democracy. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. Sikor, Thomas. The Justices and Injustices of Ecosystems Services. Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2013. Sovacool, Benjamin K., and Michael H. Dworkin. Global Energy Justice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Svarstad, Hanne, and Tor 0041. Benjaminsen. “Reading Radical Environmental Justice Through a Political Ecology Lens.” Geoforum 108 (2020): 1–​11. Taylor, Dorceta E. Toxic Communities: Environmental Racism, Industrial Pollution, and Residential Mobility. New York: New York University Press, 2014. Taylor, Dorceta E. The Rise of the American Conservation Movement: Power, Privilege, and Environmental Protection. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016. Temper, Leah, and Daniela Del Bene. “Transforming Knowledge Creation for Environ­mental and Epistemic Justice.” Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability 20 (2016): 41–​49. Temper, Leah, Daniela Del Bene, and Joan Martinez-​Alier. “Mapping the Frontiers and Front Lines of Global Environmental Justice: The EJ Atlas.” Journal of Political Ecology 22, no. 1 (2015): 255–​278.

474    Kimberly R. Marion Suiseeya Temper, Leah, Federico Demaria, Arnim Scheidel, et al. “The Global Environmental Justice Atlas (EJAtlas): Ecological Distribution Conflicts as Forces for Sustainability.” Sustainability Science 13, no. 3 (2018): 573–​584. Thurston, Chloe N. At the Boundaries of Homeownership: Credit, Discrimination, and the American State. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Van Hecken, Gert, Johan Bastiaensen, and Frédéric Huybrechs. “What’s in a Name? Epistemic Perspectives and Payments for Ecosystem Services Policies in Nicaragua.” Geoforum 63 (2015): 55–​66. Vickery, Jamie, and Lori M. Hunter. “Native Americans: Where in Environmental Justice Research?” Society and Natural Resources 29, no. 1 (2016): 36–​52. Walker, Gordan. “Beyond Distribution and Proximity: Exploring the Multiple Spatialities of Environmental Justice.” Antipode 41, no. 4 (2009): 614–​636. Walker, Gordan. Environmental Justice: Concepts, Evidence and Politics. Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2012. Whyte, Kyle Powys. “Indigenous Women, Climate Change Impacts, and Collective Action.” Hypatia 29, no. 3 (2014): 599–​616. Whyte, Kyle Powys, Joseph P. Brewer, and Jay T. Johnson. “Weaving Indigenous Science, Protocols and Sustainability Science.” Sustainability Science 11, no. 1 (2016): 25–​32. Wilmer, Franke. “Indigenizing Political Science or Decolonizing Political Scientists?” Perspectives on Politics 14, no. 4 (2016): 1050–​1051. Zanotti, Laura. Radical Territories in the Brazilian Amazon: The Kayapó’s Fight for Just Livelihoods. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2016.

Chapter 25

G l obaliz at i on of E nvironm enta l J u st i c e A Framework for Comparative Research Prakash Kashwan Introduction On July 17, 2015, Naelyn Pike, a 16-​year-​old member of the Chiricahua Apache tribe, stood resolutely with a bow and arrow in hand, with an additional half a dozen arrows in the quiver that hung on her back. Pike was at Times Square, surrounded by the extra-​bright jumbo billboards that simultaneously signify global capitalism’s prosperity and profligacy. Pike and fellow Apache activists opposed a land swap between the U.S. federal government and Resolution Copper Mining (RCM). RCM, owned in part by British company Rio Tinto, plans to extract 1.9 billion tons of copper from 2,400 acres (970 hectares) in the Tonto National Forest near Superior, Arizona. To many Apache people, this is Oak Flats, a landscape that they hold sacred.1 Oak Flats also has the largest untapped copper deposits globally. The mining companies like RCM, federal and state politicians, and some Indigenous Nation officials see it as a pathway to prosperity.2 Most Apache tribe members reject these arguments vociferously. Thousands of miles away, in Mahan forests in the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh, Gond Indigenous Adivasi Peoples are locked in a similar struggle. India’s federal government claims that the country’s energy independence is tied to the plans for open-​cast coal mining in Mahan and other Indigenous territories. As I discuss later, these mines are expected to have debilitating effects on the Gonds’ social, economic, and cultural lifeworlds. These cases are both featured on the Global Atlas of Environmental Justice (EJ Atlas https://​ejat​las.org/​), which documents social conflicts around environmental issues. The goal of EJ Atlas is to make environmental justice (EJ) struggles “more visible, highlight claims and testimonies and to make the case for true corporate and state accountability for the injustices inflicted through their activities.”3 A group of scholars argues that the communities featured on EJ Atlas are part of a “global movement for environmental justice” because they belong to “classes of conflicts that appear regularly elsewhere in the world (Martinez-​Alier et al. 2016, p. 747). These arguments are similar to the scholarship on transnational activism involving nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and social

476   Prakash Kashwan movements that contribute to international norms to “restructure world politics” (Khagram, Riker, and Sikkink 2002). While transnational norm diffusion and aggregation of socio-​ ecological conflicts can help broaden the EJ advocacy (Schroeder et al. 2008; Schlosberg and Collins 2014), it can also obfuscate fundamental differences between EJ advocacy and EJ policy responses in specific contexts. A critic argues that the rapid expansion of EJ’s scope has led to “a diffusion of meaning, and the concept is not readily applied globally” (Jenkins 2018, p. 119; see also, Williams and Mawdsley 2006; Mehta et al. 2014). A comparative politics of EJ must grapple with differences in social, political, and economic contexts even as it seeks to draw theoretical and empirically-​grounded lessons across and between cases and contexts (also see Marion Suiseeya, this volume; Fuentes George, this volume). To advance these debates, this chapter presents an analytical framework for comparative analyses of the legal, institutional, and policy differences that shape the emergence, policy and programmatic uptake, and the effects of EJ advocacy. EJ advocacy in the United States emerged over the past 50 years in response to the evidence of “environmental racism,” which refers to the instances in which people of color or marginalized ethnic groups bear a more significant share of environmental hazards and harms (Chavis 1993; Bullard 1993, 2000). The related concept of “environmental injustice” accounts for both race-​and class-​related differences in the distribution of environmental risks and hazards (Cole and Foster 2001, pp. 10, 15). Yet, because EJ concepts and strategies evolved within the social, legal, and political context specific to the United States, applying them to non-​US contexts could also introduce errors and misunderstandings. The efficacy of legal and policy reforms, including the regulatory framework that makes it costly for industries and utilities to externalize the cost of environmental pollution, is especially sensitive to the effects of national and local contexts. The framing, design, enactment, and enforcement of policies and institutional changes reflect the differences of power and influence among social groups that compete for political and economic influence (Knight 1992; for a recent review, see Kashwan et al. 2019). This chapter draws on the tools and concepts from institutional analysis and comparative environmental politics (CEP) to sketch a formal comparative EJ approach. CEP is “the systematic study and comparison of environmental politics in different countries,” often used to explain the differences in the workings of environmental policies and environmental outcomes (Steinberg and VanDeveer 2012, p. 5). CEP scholars analyze how the differences in political systems shape who participates in policy-​making, what kind of policies come about, whether they are successful in protecting the environment, and how they intersect with social justice concerns (Hochstetler and Keck 2007; Tang, Tang, and Chiu 2011; Kashwan 2017a; Sowers 2018). They also study domination and power in decentralized environmental governance (Poteete and Ribot 2011) and how the intersections of domestic laws and international agreements shape transnational environmental activism (Weinthal and Watters 2010). As EJ advocacy goes global, CEP scholars have an opportunity to contribute fresh insights to EJ research and analysis. Building on the EJ movement’s definition of the environment as “where we live, where we work, where we play, and where we learn” (Cole and Foster 2001, p. 16), this chapter compares and contrasts the key features of EJ advocacy in the United States and India. Noticeably, the India–​US comparative analysis offered here is an example of numerous other comparative EJ research possibilities. Moreover, India and the United States are both large federal countries, offering comparative research opportunities at the subnational level. The next section outlines a political economy of policies and institutions (PEPI) framework, which

Globalization of Environmental Justice    477 accounts for the structuring effects of institutions while also accounting for the differences of political capabilities and powers of main actors in society, market, and politics. Such a comparative EJ analysis helps explain remarkably different past EJ trajectories and the various policy and political projects needed for enforcing EJ. The PEPI framework forms the basis of a selective mapping of some of the key features of EJ advocacy in the United States and India. These discussions offer essential background for a comparative analysis of the status of EJ advocacy and outcomes in the two countries. To account for the fundamental differences in the EJ trajectories in these two countries, I offer a contextualized contrast later in the chapter. This approach is different from the abstract unifying principles that political theorists and critical geographers have articulated (Schlosberg and Collins 2014; Martinez-​Alier et al. 2016). This chapter concludes with a distillation of essential insights for research in the emerging field of comparative environmental justice.

Conceptual Framework: Political Economy of Policies and Institutions Institutions are “the rules of the game in a society” (North 1990, p. 3). They structure the “opportunities and constraints” individuals and groups of individuals face in any particular situation, “the benefits they obtain or are excluded from, and how they reason about the situation” (Ostrom 2005, p. 3). While it is common to think of institutions as a means to address social dilemmas and induce cooperation, some scholars argue that institutions are a byproduct of distributional conflicts (Knight 1992). Such a conflictual view of institutions is especially relevant in the contexts of skewed distributions of social, political, and economic power, which influences the processes and outcomes of institutional development, contestation, and change. Moreover, because of the intricate workings of social and political power, which shapes how individuals think of their place in the world and what they believe they can realistically aspire to, they may not always express their grievances (Kashwan 2016a). Accordingly, distributional conflicts do not exhaust the entire gamut of effects that institutions produce (for an overview of the literature, see Kashwan et al. 2019). The PEPI framework builds on these insights to offer a user-​friendly approach to multilevel analyses of institutional development and change over time. Compared to either a “theory” or a “model,” the use of a framework offers several advantages (see Schlager 2007). A framework enables a researcher to identify key variables, factors, processes, and relationships relevant to a specific inquiry. As I demonstrate in this section, a framework is also helpful for drawing on multiple theories and methods for a coherent study of the processes and outcomes of interest. For example, Elinor Ostrom and colleagues developed the institutional analysis and development (IAD) framework to analyze the management of common pool resources and the provision of public goods (Ostrom 2007). The PEPI framework shown in Figure 25.1 adapts the IAD framework for cross-​scale analyses of micro-​, meso-​, and macro-​level factors and processes. Contrary to the IAD’s foundations in methodological individualism, PEPI accounts for social groups and other corporate actors who mobilize to influence the framing, development, and enforcement of EJ policies and institutions.4 As shown in the middle portion of Figure 25.1, political and economic relations mediate how individuals and groups engage with institutions and policies. PEPI recognizes

478   Prakash Kashwan individuals’ roles as social and political agents who can mobilize collectively. Yet, instead of taking such mobilizing capacity or intent for granted, this framework accounts for differences of experiences and other kinds of inequalities within and between social groups. For example, while most Indigenous peoples oppose extractivism, some Indigenous American Nations seek to take control of the oil and gas resources within their territories to secure “sovereignty by the barrel” (Thompson 2016). Other reports suggest that the opinions about North Dakota’s oil boom among Indigenous American residents depend on whether they own land and mineral rights, benefit personally from the oil boom, or are part of the local governments responsible for making difficult fiscal decisions.5 Various intersecting processes of cooperation and contestation between different stakeholders and groups, including the status quo’s beneficiaries, shape the processes and outcomes of institutional and policy changes (middle to the right half of Figure 25.1). The relative efficacy of sociopolitical mobilization also depends on long-​enduring political intermediation mechanisms (e.g., labor unions, federations of citizen groups, and politically salient intersectional coalitions) (Kashwan 2017a; Fisher, Dow, and Ray 2017). For example, tripartite corporatist bargaining between business, labor, and government helped establish and maintain the welfare state in Scandinavia and other European countries (Rhodes 2001). On the other hand, counter-​mobilization by businesses and their supporters in the political system led to the decline of labor unions in the United States and undermined protections that workers enjoyed until the 1970s (Rector 2018). The outcomes of these efforts to seek institutional and policy changes produce feedback effects (as shown in the dashed lines running back from “Outcomes”) that shape social groups’ ability to cooperate or influence the balance of power within the institutional and policy processes. Such “policy feedback” determines how policies and institutions at time T1 shape the prospects of institutional change at time T2 (Mettler and SoRelle 2014). These dynamic interactions between individuals, groups, and political authorities occur within the bounds set by the broader historical context that helped shape political institutions and contemporary social and cultural environment (as shown in the left portion of Figure 25.1). Examples of these effects include the historical legacies of

Historical Context

Laws, Policies, and Institutions

|

Biophysical Context

Social and Cultural Context

Political-Economic Relations

| Actors (Individuals/ Political Agents/Social Groups)

Processes of Institutional and Policy Development, Enforcement, or Change

Outcomes

Figure 25.1  The political economy of policies and institutions (PEPI) framework. Author’s contribution, adapted from Ostrom (2007) and conceptualized in Kashwan (2017a).

Table 25.1 An overview of environmental justice (EJ) milestones in the

United States Year

Milestone

1971

Hawkins v. Town of Shaw Court Case

1971

Urban Environment Conference (UEC) founded

1976

United Auto Workers (UAW)’s National Action Conference on Jobs and the Environment, Black Lake, Michigan.

1977

EPA national grant for UEC to fund 11 “Urban Workshops”

1978

The Love Canal Parents’ movement

1982

The General Accounting Office (GAO) EJ study; Iconic protests against the Warren County Polychlorinated Biphenyl (PCB) Landfill

1987

The first national-​level EJ study by United Church of Christ Commission for Racial Justice

1988

West Harlem Environmental Action (WE ACT) founded

1990

Southwest Network for Environmental and Economic Justice (SNEEJ) and Indigenous Environmental Network (IEN) founded; the First National People of Color Leadership Summit; the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) delegation meets Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) officials

1991

EPA Office of Environmental Equity Established

1992

The Office of Environmental Justice (OEJ)

1993

Arkansas brings the Environmental Equity Act; EPA creates the National Environmental Justice Advisory Council (NEJAC)

1994

President Bill Clinton issued Executive Order 12898; EPA’s Environmental Justice Small Grants Program

1995

EPA and the NEJAC co-​sponsor a series of public hearings on Urban Revitalization and brownfields; six regional EJ networks co-​found the Environmental Justice Fund

1996

CBC establishes the Environmental Justice Braintrust

2002

Alabama Center for Rural Enterprise Formed (ACRE; now Center for Rural Enterprise and Environmental Justice [CREEJ]). Founder Catherine Flowers emerges as a prominent EJ activist; appointed in March 2021 to the White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council

2005

The disproportionate effects of Hurricane Katrina on racial minorities in New Orleans shines light on environmental racism

2011

EPA launches Plan EJ 2014

2014

Flint Water Crisis reported

2015

EPA Guidance on Considering EJ in the Development of Regulatory Actions

2016

EPA releases Environmental Justice Strategic Plan for 2016–​2020

2017

Dakota Access Pipeline Protests (No DAPL); Catherine Flowers organizes a visit of the UN Special Rapporteur on the Human Rights to Safe Drinking Water and Sanitation to Lowndes County, Alabama

2020

The climate justice group MN350 launches Stop Line 3 in northern Minnesota

2021

President Biden announces the creation of to the White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council; the Keystone XL Pipeline is terminated; President Biden signs Executive Order 14008 requiring that 40 percent of Federal investments in climate and environmental programs flow to disadvantaged communities (Justice40 Initiative)

For an interactive primer on Hurricane Katrina, see https://​www.arc​gis.com/​apps/​Casc​ade/​index. html?appid=​21066​93b3​9454​f0eb​0abc​5c2d​df9c​e40

480   Prakash Kashwan colonialism and other types of path dependency effects shaping the racialized nature of environmental harms (Pulido, Kohl, and Cotton 2016). Another useful contribution of the PEPI framework is its ability to account for the effects of biophysical context.6 Recent EJ scholarship argues how environmental restoration and conservation projects contribute to the capabilities and assets of EJ communities (McCaffrey 2008; Schlosberg and Collins 2014). On the other hand, government wildlife agencies and big conservation groups also seek to place well-​protected natural landscapes under national parks, which has led to the dispossession of tens of millions of Indigenous and rural populations. These communities have traditionally used the lands that constitute a disproportionate share of the areas included within national parks and other exclusive wilderness areas (Kashwan 2017b). Overall, along with historical and social contexts, the biophysical environment plays a crucial yet ambiguous role in environmental injustices. The PEPI framework responds to recent calls by EJ scholar David Pellow to offer a “multiscalar” methodological approach for a better comprehension of “the complex spatial and temporal causes, consequences, and possible resolutions of EJ struggles” (Pellow 2016, p. 223; Newell et al. 2021; also see Pellow, this volume). To this end, it brings together some of the most salient concepts from comparative politics, CEP, and policy studies, although no single research project can address each of these aspects with equal depth. The specific parts of PEPI most relevant to any one project depend on the nature of research questions and the scale of analysis.

EJ Advocacy and Legal and Policy Responses in the United States The history of settler colonialism, Indigenous American dispossessions, slavery, and the Civil Rights Movement, specifically the 1968 Memphis sanitation strike, each inspired the EJ movement in the United States (Taylor 2000).7 Cole and Foster (2001, p. 20) suggest that, instead of tracing the origins of EJ advocacy to specific grassroots mobilizations in Love Canal (1978) or Warren County (1982), it is more productive to think of the US EJ movement as “a river, fed over time by many tributaries.” Table 25.1 presents an overview of the critical EJ milestones, including public responses (for extensive reviews, see Bullard et al. 2007). The speed and magnitude of the EJ movement’s impact on the US federal legal and policy process in the 1990s surprised even the most seasoned of policy-​makers (Cutter 1995, p. 111). I argue that this is attributable to a set of four contextual factors that shape US EJ advocacy. First, the EJ movement builds on the legacy of the Civil Rights Movement and the protections enshrined in the Civil Rights Act (CRA) of 1964. The CRA prohibits discrimination based on race, color, or national origin by any entity that receives federal funds. CRA’s statutory infrastructure allowed President Bill Clinton to sign, in February 1994, the Executive Order (EO) 12898 “Federal Actions to Address Environmental Justice in Minority Populations and Low-​Income Populations.” Drawing on the provisions of Section 602 of Title VI of the CRA, EO12898 requires that any federally funded program that affects human health or the environment may not use criteria, methods, or practices that produce

Globalization of Environmental Justice    481 discriminatory effects based on race, color, or national origin. EO1289 also led to the establishment of an Interagency Working Group on Environmental Justice. Second, early EJ mobilization of the 1970s originated in the emerging coalitions between labor unions and environmental groups. This type of EJ advocacy inspired Senator Hart to work with the United Auto Workers (UAW), United Steel Workers, and the Oil, Chemical, and Atomic Workers to launch the Urban Environment Conference (UEC). These coalitions demanded full employment policies to challenge the industry argument that environmental regulations would undercut new employment opportunities. However, the processes of deindustrialization and neo-​liberal restructuring in the 1980s and 1990s undermined the demands for full employment policies and led to the labor and EJ movements drifting apart (Rector 2018). This history likely contributed to the limited impact EJ advocacy had in the realm of economic policy-​making. Third, EJ advocacy benefited significantly from engaging with the mainstream political process, beginning in 1990 when a Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) delegation, including prominent social scientists and political activists, met Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) officials. The CBC has been the most progressive voting block on environmental matters in the US Congress (Konisky 2016). The part that EJ groups played during the 1992 Presidential campaign helped put two prominent EJ leaders Rev. Benjamin Chavis and Dr. Robert Bullard, on the Clinton transition team. They shaped the nascent EJ agenda, eventually leading to EO12898 (Cole and Foster 2001). In September 1993, the EPA created the National Environmental Justice Advisory Council (NEJAC), which gave prominent EJ figures from academia, civil society, business, and industry a seat on the table (Cutter 1995). On the flip side, the enforcement of EJ policies and programs has fluctuated dramatically between Democratic and Republican presidential administrations. The George W. Bush administration weakened EJ enforcement, as EJ nearly “dropped from the big show altogether.”8 A report from the office of the EPA Inspector General accused the then EPA of undermining the EJ agenda by shifting the focus of implementing EO 12898 “away from poor and minority communities” (Konisky 2016, p. 2). The Obama administration sought to make up for this loss of momentum. However, it failed to substantively strengthen the statutory architecture for EJ, which continues to be in the form of executive orders. The Trump administration limited the scope of EPA oversight, initiated rollbacks of crucial legislation, implemented significant budget cuts, reduced EPA staff, and closed dozens of programs. The New York Times reports that the Trump administration sought to reverse 100 different environmental rules.9 The Trump administration also sought to dismantle EPA’s Office of Environmental Justice.10 However, the core formal rules of the federal EJ architecture (e.g., EO 12898, EPA’s Environmental Justice Small Grants Program, and EJ 2014) remain intact. The Biden administration has begun the work of restoring the implementation of these EJ provisions as a priority.11 This includes the creation of a government-​wide Justice40 Initiative to deliver 40 percent of the overall benefits of relevant federal investments to disadvantaged communities.12 Fourth, an important influence of the EJ movement in the United States has been in the form of several programs and protocols that the federal and state governments have institutionalized specifically on EJ. Starting with Arkansas’s Environmental Equity Act in 1993, nearly every state has enacted EJ policies, programs, and grants, just as state governments have sought to address climate change (Rabe 2014). Many federal agencies, including the Department of Defense, have adopted measures to pursue the directives of EO12898.

482   Prakash Kashwan In 1994, the EPA established the Environmental Justice Small Grants Program to build interorganizational collaborative partnerships to address local environmental and public health issues. By 2013, this program awarded more than $24 million in funding to more than 1,400 community-​based and local and tribal organizations. The number and scope of the brownfields grants expanded significantly over the years, including during the Trump administration. For example, in May 2020, the EPA selected 151 communities to receive 155 EPA brownfields grants worth $65.6 million to assess, clean up, and redevelop underutilized properties while protecting public health and the environment.13 Overall, no country other than the United States has as many federal and state regulations, programs, and grants focused specifically on EJ. However, many of these instruments have rather been symbolic and have yet to result in substantive changes in EJ outcomes. To be clear, the discussion in this section does not imply that each of these four factors contributed to EJ outcomes equally or in the same way (see later discussion). The main point here is that the emergence and endurance of highly institutionalized EJ advocacy in the United States resulted from a complex configuration of political and economic factors that EJ scholarship does not always discuss adequately. These contextual conditions and the highly institutionalized framework of EJ advocacy and response are missing from EJ advocacy in India, which is the next section’s subject.

Environmental Injustices in India: A Contextually Informed Analysis Environmentalism of the Poor, Environmental Injustices, and Social Movements India is home to millions of environmental injustices as well as hundreds of long-​standing grassroots EJ movements (see Ciecierska-​Holmes et al. 2019); yet EJ is not on the mainstream policy radar in India. There are no EJ policies or programs at either the central (federal) scale or in the states. Scholars often characterize grassroots environmentalism in India as “environmentalism of the poor” (Martinez-​Alier et al. 2016). In this perspective, poor people protect the environment because of their social, cultural, and economic dependence on environmental resources, as evident in the Chipko (Hug the Trees) and Narmada Bachao (Save the Narmada River) movements, which heavily shaped global dam movements and activism (Khagram 2004). Some scholars argue that this form of environmentalism is “centered on social justice and builds on the premise that the fights for human rights and environment are inseparable” (Anguelovski and Martinez-​Alier 2014, p. 169). Yet, while the EJ movement has focused mainly on a disproportionate distribution of environmental risks and hazards, the environmentalism of the poor concentrates primarily on showcasing the role that the poor play in protecting the environment (Martinez-​Alier et al. 2016). Equating environmentalism of the poor to EJ has produced two types of fault lines in the Indian context. The emphasis on the poor people’s protection of natural landscapes has perpetuated a “new traditionalist discourse” in which rural and Indigenous communities’

Globalization of Environmental Justice    483 lifestyles and livelihoods become instrumental to environmental protection (Sinha, Guruani, and Greenberg 1997). EJ, in that sense, represents a “cultural opposition” between the “indigenous values of holism and the respect for nature” and the dominant strands of environmentalism (Williams and Mawdsley 2006, p. 662). Such an understanding of EJ homogenizes poor people’s interests and fails to account for the complex stakes that different Indigenous groups may have in the environment. This is similar to Amartya Sen’s critique of mainstream theories of development, which fail to account for deep-​seated inequalities of social and political power responsible for the capability deprivations that different social groups face (Sen 1993). Two, the focus on the poor people as environmental protectors has led to a neglect of economic and social justice questions within environmental movements. Some recent studies indicate that the occurrence and quantity of hazardous waste generated at the district level are proportional to the population of socially and economically disadvantaged residents (Basu and Chakraborty 2016); villagers living closer to mines experience more respiratory illnesses and malaria-​related workday losses (Saha et al. 2011); mining villages have lower agriculture productivity and higher incidence of respiratory illnesses, especially among women (Hota and Behera 2015); and, the exposure to the coal-​related emissions goes up with an increasing population of Adivasis and Dalits (Kopas et al. 2020). Another recent study sponsored by the state of Chhatisgarh shows the Tamnar coal-​mining region has tuberculosis rates nearly double the national count and almost triple the statewide rates.14 Except for a few of these studies, there is little awareness about EJ in Indian politics, administration, or the scientific research community. As a staff scientist quoted in New York Times said about the social effects of air pollution, “We aren’t putting a careful enough lens on people’s occupation, or where they live, or what their socioeconomic status is.”15 The most glaring instance of such neglect pertains to the question of Dalits or the members of so-​called lower caste communities, who bear a disproportionate burden of urban environmental cleanup. For example, the only “job” available for hundreds of thousands of Dalit women is to collect human waste from dry latrines in bamboo baskets and carry it away on their heads. Though banned under a 1993 law, this demeaning practice continues with the euphemistic label of “manual scavenging.”16 Dalit men make up nearly all of India’s sanitation workers, including in municipal governments, the private sector, and in the capital city, New Delhi.17 Several hundred Dalits have lost their lives in recent years owing to the toxic fumes they encountered while unclogging sewer lines and septic tanks manually without the necessary protective instruments.18 Since 1993, the Safai Karmachari Andolan (SKA, the Sanitation Workers’ Movement) has been waging a battle against manual scavenging through social and legal mobilization.19 Yet the concerns of Dalits did not come up in EJ discussions in India until very recently (cf. Sharma 2019; Ranganathan 2021). This prompted Indian sociologist and human rights activist Gail Omvedt to ask, “Why Dalits dislike environmentalists.”20 The environmentalism of the poor framework fails to recognize the plight of migrant workers and omits the discussion of routine oppressions against Dalits, Muslims, and women from oppressed groups, which raises the question of recognitional justice (Chu and Michael 2019). Such omissions are especially problematic given India’s rapidly deteriorating environment and the overwhelming scope of de facto environmental injustices that affect the food and water security of hundreds of millions (Sircar 2023).

484   Prakash Kashwan

Legal and Policy Responses to Environmental Injustice India’s environmental governance apparatus reflects generally poor levels of sensitivity toward civil and political rights despite the highly entrenched nature of social disparities. Unlike the CRA in the United States, India lacks a strong civil rights architecture meant to protect Dalits, Adivasis, and Muslims against the widespread practices of discrimination in all spheres of public and social life.21 The Protection of Civil Rights Act (PCRA) of 1955 was designed to prescribe punishment for the preaching and practice of “untouchability.” This law defined “civil rights” very narrowly as “any right accruing to a person by reason of the abolition of ‘untouchability’ under article 17 of the Constitution.”22 India’s Parliament sought to write off the failure of PCRA by enacting the Scheduled Castes and Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, in 1989. In general, the law has been a failure, though it continues to be an important anchor for basic protections for Dalit and Adivasi. The National Crime Records Bureau reported 42,793 cases of crimes against Dalits in 2018—​that is, on an average, one crime every 15 minutes.23 In 2013, the Parliament of India enacted the Prohibition of Employment as Manual Scavengers and their Rehabilitation Act, which calls for wider socio-​economic interventions.24 India has no overarching law that protects ethnic and religious minorities against the violation of civil and political rights (Chaney 2020). Moreover, mainstream media and public officials often paint the issues concerning each of the distinct minority groups as “sectarian issues” meant to ensure the welfare of specific groups.25 Adivasi rights to natural resources are protected under two statues that have been introduced since the mid-​1990s. The Panchayats (Extension to the Scheduled Areas) Act (PESA) of 1996 gives discretionary power to village assemblies to manage natural resources, including forests, land, water, and minor minerals. PESA also gives village assemblies the right to veto any development projects that interfere with their autonomy, which led to a July 1997 ruling by the Supreme Court, popularly known as the Samata Judgment. In it, the Court asserted that neither the state governments nor private corporations could take over any public land in Adivasis areas. NGOs, social movements, and quasi-​judicial environment tribunals often cite the Samata Judgment as an inspiration for their work. The Forest Rights Act (FRA), enacted in 2006, recognizes the right to the land that Adivasi peasant families have used for subsistence farming for generations but without them being recognized as legal owners of the land. The FRA also recognizes Adivasi rights to collect, use, and sell forest products other than timber and the right to collectively manage and protect forests designated as “community forests” (Kashwan 2017a). Yet India’s forest bureaucracy rules by the colonial era Indian Forest Act of 1927, which criminalized all local uses of forests and is in force to date. While the FRA is designed to address these problems, the foresters exploit legal loopholes to prioritize the 1927 law while sabotaging the FRA implementation. The provisions of PESA and FRA have led to some spectacular judgments (e.g., one by the Supreme Court of India to stall a $2 billion bauxite mining project of the London-​based Vedanta Resources).26 The mining project would have devastated Niyamgiri hill forests in eastern India that serve important social, economic, cultural, and environmental needs for the Dongria Kondh Adivasis and local Dalit communities. Even in this case, though, instead of framing this as a question of environmental justice, the Court justices emphasized cultural and religious rights while de-​emphasizing the Dongria’s economic dependence on these forests. Such lack of a “justice sensibility” among India’s public institutions is a fundamental

Globalization of Environmental Justice    485 oddity that sets it apart from not just the United States, but also from the Americas at large, where the debates on Indigenous rights and EJ are at a more advanced stage.

The State Responses to the Pursuits of Environmental Justice EJ scholars and activists in the United States have often decried the failure of the EPA and state environmental agencies to act decisively to ameliorate environmental injustices. Yet, except for the Trump administration, one rarely hears of a federal or state agency showing overt hostility to the EJ agenda. Such hostilities do characterize the state responses to EJ advocacy in India. For example, in the past two decades federal ministries and agencies have made numerous attempts to formally repeal sections of PESA, the Samata Judgment of the Supreme Court, and the FRA (Randeria 2003; Kashwan 2016b, 2017a). The provisions of PESA, Samata Judgment, and the FRA challenge the unilateral and unaccountable control that federal ministries and state agencies maintain over the country’s forests and mineral resources. Yet the state control of natural resources is also linked to the interests of conservation groups, who have used their influence with the state to create exclusionary nature preservation zones. Conservation groups, therefore, share the state’s goal of resisting the local people’s forestland rights per these laws. In 2009, a group of retired forest department officials, acting in concert with several prominent wildlife organizations, filed several copycat lawsuits to challenge the “constitutional validity” of the FRA. The petitioners argued that the FRA’s protection of Adivasi forest and land rights would undermine the ability of forestry agencies to be the “custodian of forest lands.”27 The reference is to the 22 percent of India’s territory that is legally designated as state forests and remains under the territorial control of the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change (MOEFCC) and state forestry agencies. Echoing age-​old prejudices, the petitioners also claimed the FRA would cause the destruction of forests and violate India’s international commitments.28 Over time, the Supreme Court centralized these copycat anti-​FRA lawsuits into one jumbo lawsuit. Proceedings in this lawsuit led the Court to instruct the state governments in February 2019 to “evict” more than 1.89 families of Adivasis and other forest peoples whose rights had yet to be legalized under the FRA.29 After a national outcry from activists and scholars, the Supreme Court put this order under abeyance, but the sword of dispossession hangs heavy on millions of Adivasis to this day.30 In this instance, numerous state actors and agencies use the formal legal infrastructure to thwart EJ. In other cases, state agencies undermine the rule of law with impunity to undermine both environmental protections and EJ advocacy. For example, despite the elected village council in Mahan formally refusing its consent to the mining project, government agencies continued to pursue the project illegally.31 In fact, the state officials reportedly forged the signatures of elected representatives needed to secure the Mahan village assembly’s consent to the mining proposal.32 Greenpeace India paid a heavy price for supporting the anti-​mining movement in Mahan, including the government accusing it of “anti-​national intentions.”33 A number of government agencies launched various “legal actions,” including the freezing of bank accounts and threats of revoking Greenpeace’s license to operate. Eventually, in August 2014, the Supreme Court of India ruled that the coal mining project in Mahan forests and several other blocks were illegal, which prompted the National Green

486   Prakash Kashwan Tribunal to revoke its permissions, and the MOEFCC to ban all mining in the area.34 These successes notwithstanding, the government plans to build dozens of new coal-​fired power plants, though the price of solar-​powered electricity is 14 percent lower than that of coal-​ fired power.35 India’s largest coal stocks are in the states of Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Odisha, Madhya Pradesh, and Telangana, which are also home to the largest populations of the poor and marginalized groups (Roy, Kuruvilla, and Bhardwaj 2019). The transition away from coal is intertwined in some ways with the notions of “just transition” that evolved out of the highly unionized mining and energy sector jobs in the Global North.36 Unfortunately, most of the jobs available to Adivasis in India’s coal belt barely pay minimum wages while still contributing heavily to environmental injustices of various types. A recent Greenpeace India report used data from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) to show that India tops the list of countries with the highest anthropogenic sulfur dioxide (SO2) emissions and has more than 15 percent of all hotspots in the world.37 The hotspots include Singrauli, where Mahan is located. Ironically, the government touts the rapid expansion of solar-​based power and India’s progress toward meeting the Paris Climate Agreement targets to defend the expansion of coal, with the stated goal of universalizing the access to electricity and India’s right to development (Dubash 2019). India’s poor, including its large population of migrant workers, pay most dearly for its air pollution (Kopas et al. 2020), while members of India’s middle classes install air purifiers or step into commercially run “oxygen bars” to purchase puffs of pure air.38 A report by the US-​based Health Effects Institute estimated that around 1.2 million Indians died in 2017 due to air pollution. Yet India’s former environment minister, who also happened to be a medical doctor and the Union Minister of Science and Technology, rejected this report and accused its authors of “create(ing) panic.”39 These responses are shocking, considering that 21 of the 30 most polluted cities in the world are in India.40 India’s EJ movements must contend with a state that is hostile to the assertion of poor people’s rights to a clean environment or their right to land and other natural resources. More importantly, the tendency of state agencies to act with impunity against the rule of law suggests that protections of a liberal legal framework cannot be taken for granted. Importantly, none of this is new or can be attributed solely to the government led by Narendra Modi.

EJ Advocacy and Counter-​R esistance: A Comparative Analysis The preceding discussions of the trajectory of EJ in the United States and some challenges for thinking about EJ in the Indian context reveal important differences between the two countries relevant to comparative EJ research. Yet the existing scholarship on the globalization of EJ elides these differences (Martinez-​Allier et al. 2016; for critical reviews, see Mehta et al. 2014). This section uses the PEPI framework outlined earlier to build on recent scholarship in India and the United States (Ciecierska-​Holmes et al. 2019; Kashwan et al. 2021; Kashwan 2021) to analyze three insights about the differences in EJ advocacy,

Globalization of Environmental Justice    487 its potential uptake in public agenda, their translation into policies and programs, and the overall outcomes: (1) legal and institutional architecture shapes EJ advocacy and outcomes, (2) political context and political relations shape the pursuits of EJ, and (3) the economic context has a strong influence on the nature of EJ advocacy. These analyses focus specifically on political, economic, and institutional aspects of EJ work though the differences in how social and cultural contexts shape EJ work are also important (see Ranco et al. 2011; Ravi Rajan 2014; Sharma 2019; Ciecierska-​Holmes et al. 2019).

Legal and Institutional Architecture Shapes EJ Advocacy and Outcomes EJ advocacy in the United States and India seeks to alter the institutional status quo dominated by capitalist exploitation of humans and the environment. Yet the struggles for EJ unfold in the presence of specific legal, administrative, and institutional arrangements. A focus on social movements in most EJ studies in the United States, and many of the Indian environmental politics studies, often misses opportunities to focus more on the broader institutional environments (see, Baptista et al. 2022; Srivastava et al. 2022). However, the implications of these omissions differ significantly in each of these countries. Table 25.2 outlines the main features of institutional architectures in the United States and India, followed by a brief discussion. EJ advocacy in the United States is characterized by a much higher level of institutionalization (Harrison 2015), which is an important area of focus for comparative research. There is a broad consensus that EJ constitutes an important arena for the enforcement of civil Table 25.2 Institutional features of environmental justice (EJ) advocacy and

legal infrastructure United States

India

Civil rights laws

Provide a strong foundation for EJ advocacy.

Extremely weak and not applied to EJ; questions of social justice framed apolitically, as a matter of “welfare”

EJ advocacy and movement

Well-​organized EJ groups backed by coordinated efforts of scholar-​activists. Vibrant engagements with Indigenous American activists.

Adivasi mass movements backed by activists and NGOs; Dalit movements not organized on EJ questions; Adivasi-​Dalit movements remain disconnected

EJ institutionalization in public policies and programs

Heavily institutionalized; several federal executive orders, directives, and grants, coupled with state-​level policies and programs.

Not institutionalized; no federal EJ directives. State-​level programs on the enforcement of Adivasi rights are dysfunctional; EJ debates often exclude Dalits rights questions

Institutional accountability

Patchy, but without a sense of impunity. Judicial independence, albeit weakened by neo-​ liberalization of jurisprudence.

State agencies act with fairly high levels of impunity, with occasional checks from the Supreme Court. The rule of law rarely applies to state agencies.

488   Prakash Kashwan rights protections under the CRA in the United States. This is evident in the key judicial precedents, numerous federal and state policies and programs, and a strong commitment by a section of lawmakers who continue to pursue EJ goals via new bills and policies. With the aid of the institutional architecture backed by the CRA, EJ advocates have successfully characterized EJ as a civil rights issue (Sassman 2015). This is a major success of EJ advocacy in the United States, one that stands in stark contrast to an absence of EJ institutionalization in India. Except for references to the Constitutional guarantees of right to life and its interpretations to protect, say, the right to food (Hertel 2015), the enforcement of civil and political rights is extremely weak. On the contrary, the Supreme Court of India seems to have “jettisoned its long history of protecting free speech” by finding a senior lawyer guilty of criminal contempt for his social media posts questioning some court judgments.41 In recent years, government agencies have arrested environmental and climate activists, social workers, priests, professors, poets, lawyers, journalists, and stand-​up comedians for expressing dissent against government policies and failures. Many of these arrests have been made under the dreadful Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA), which permits the state to “detain someone without a charge for 180 days, conduct closed-​room trials, and produce secret witnesses.”42 In India, EJ is rarely framed as a civil rights issue. A prominent legal scholar equates all environmental law discussions to EJ, without making a single reference to questions of gender, caste, inequality, or social justice (Gill 2015). Deeper and comparative analyses require that access to “justice” via the legal system is distinguished from the substantive EJ outcomes, including in the distribution of costs and benefits of environmental clean-​up (see Harding 2007). Other than extremely poorly enforced policies and programs related to Adivasi land rights, one cannot think of many state policies or programs that are devoted to the pursuit of EJ. Indeed, the absence of checks and balances means that federal and state agencies get away with frequent violations of environmental regulations and the resource rights of Adivasis. Pointing to such a stark absence of EJ institutionalization in India does not imply that more laws would fix the problem. Both the PEPI framework and the insights from EJ research in the United States would caution against pinning too much hope on legal and institutional means alone. For example, despite numerous efforts, no plaintiff has prevailed in proving “a federal constitutional violation in an environmental justice suit” (Cole and Foster 2001, p. 126; Sassman 2015). Legal scholars attribute these failures to the US Supreme Court’s “continually narrowing view” of civil rights law, such that any convictions under the CRA requires proving a racially motivated intent to discriminate (Cutter 1995, p. 119; Cole and Foster 2001). This forecloses the CRA’s application to environmental justice (Sassman 2015, pp. 442–​453). In response, EJ advocates have turned to a hybrid administrative-​legal strategy to hold the EPA accountable for the Office of Civil Rights (OCR)’s obligation to investigate Title VI complaints about discriminatory impacts and release preliminary findings within 180 days. However, the EPA rarely meets these requirements. As a September 2016 letter from the US Commission on Civil Rights to President Obama stated, OCR “has never made a formal finding of discrimination and has never denied or withdrawn financial assistance from a recipient in its entire history.”43 In October 2020, a federal court ruled that the EPA violated the law by waiting a decade or more to investigate civil rights complaints filed by community groups.44

Globalization of Environmental Justice    489 More broadly, Laura Pulido and other scholars attribute the continued perpetration of environmental injustices to a heavy reliance on EJ frameworks established by the state (Pulido et al. 2016). More EJ programs, without addressing the imbalances of political and economic power, risk “window dressing,” which is how the NEJAC board members once characterized the EPA’s EJ efforts (Faber 2008, p. 135). Others have argued that a plethora of EJ programs and grants or an overwhelming institutionalization of EJ in the shadows of a neo-​liberal state may have led to “cooptation” of the EJ agenda (Harrison 2015) and may have inhibited the development of a broad-​based EJ mass movement. On the other hand, the advocacy for the protection of the rights of marginalized groups in India has relied mostly on mass movements and without the required institutional infrastructure. As such, the prospects of, pathways to, and the effects of further EJ institutionalization look very different in these two countries.

Political Context and Political Relations Shape the Pursuits of EJ EJ advocacy in the United States has successfully engaged the mainstream political process. It led to the enactment of federal and state-​level policies and programs discussed earlier, but the effects of such politicization extend beyond formal measures. Research shows that the variation in state-​level EJ enforcements reflects concerns for specific social groups more than a regulatory framework that would be responsive to variation in the nature and extent of environmental injustices (Abel et al. 2015). State agencies focus on facilities in highly vulnerable EJ communities, but they tend to be less active in punishing EJ violations in Hispanic communities (Konisky and Reenock 2013). This may be tied to the difficulties Democrats have had in their influence among Latinx communities. However, the influence of the early history of the EJ movement among Latinx farmworkers (Cole and Foster 2001) and an emergent EJ-​oriented environmental populism among Latinx groups (Chandrasekaran 2021) is worth investigating. EJ outcomes also differ by the political leanings of local bodies, as the utilities in Republican-​leaning areas violate the Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA) more frequently than they do in areas that support the Democrats (Switzer 2019). Each of these findings resonates with CEP scholars, yet a PEPI perspective would caution against assuming the universal political salience of EJ issues despite the severity of the problem and the potential electoral strength of EJ communities in different national contexts. The marginalized EJ groups in India exercise very little substantive political influence. Despite a population of nearly 105 million, Indigenous Adivasis do not command a significant electoral influence.45 It took India 60 years since independence to address the fundamental questions of Adivasis land and resource rights, as these issues gained political salience in conjunction with a broader debate on distributional effects of India’s neo-​liberal economic policies since 1991 (Kashwan 2017a). On the other hand, even though Dalits are a significantly more influential electoral constituency, Dalit parties have failed to bring EJ questions into the political arena.46 Overall, despite the celebrated institutions of democracy in India, the nature of the relationship between EJ communities and the state is not amenable to the analyses premised on the assumptions of electoral accountability. Elections also do not have much bearing on the pursuits of EJ. While EJ scholars in the United States

490   Prakash Kashwan also recommend the need to scrutinize the state’s role in EJ enforcement (Pulido et al. 2016), the “cunning state” in India presents very different kinds of challenges (Randeria 2003).

Social and Economic Contexts Shape the Nature of EJ Advocacy Scholars often attribute the exploitation of the environment and marginalized populations to the hegemony of neo-​liberal models of economic policy-​making, yet neo-​liberalism takes on very different lives in different national contexts (Holifield 2004; Edelman 2019; Kashwan et al. 2019). While a full discussion of these complexities is beyond the scope of this chapter, it is important to consider the rather counterintuitive argument that Clinton-​ era “neo-​communitarian” EJ programs, among others, helped deepen the Reagan-​era neo-​ liberal project (Holifield 2004, p. 285). In addition to the enactment of EO21898, the Clinton administration also introduced the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act in 1996, which led to the weakening of the welfare state in the United States (Edelman 2019). This Act also expanded the federal death penalty, provided new resources for hiring 100,000 new police officers, and allocated $9.7 billion for new prisons. These resources prompted policy-​makers to see prisons as an engine for local economies suffering from the decline of the coal industry in Appalachia, thereby triggering a “prison boom” and a “mining-​to-​ prison pipeline” that served the interests of the so-​called prison industrial complex (Perdue 2018, p. 177; Pellow 2016). The neo-​liberal policy environment also influenced the effectiveness of brownfields grants between 2003 and 2007, which were less likely to go to communities with high proportions of non-​White or low-​income populations (Dull and Wernstedt 2010). Once awarded, the grants contributed to “gentrification,” in which the improvements in a neighborhood lead to a spike in rental and real estate costs, thereby making it unaffordable to racial minorities who face “widespread displacement” (Essoka 2010). More broadly, state-​level EJ policy actions from 1990 to 2009 not only failed to alleviate the unequal burdens of pollution on African Americans, but EPA Region 5 states also saw a significant increase in the burden on African Americans, even as pollution burden decreased significantly for Whites (Bullock, Ard, and Saalman 2018, p. 483).47 The gains in the gender diversity of leadership positions within major environmental organizations and government agencies have accrued mostly to White women (Taylor 2014). Overall, much of this evidence suggests that the distributional effects of EJ programs have failed to alter the status quo considerably. As mentioned previously, in India, there are no formal EJ policies or programs. Moreover, the illiberal consequences of neo-​liberal economic policies (e.g., the development of crony-​capitalism) has led to further entrenching of long-​standing barriers against environmental justice (Kashwan 2023). The Supreme Court Justices once compared parts of central India to the Congo described in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, a place dominated by “predatory forms of capitalism, supported and promoted by the State in direct contravention of constitutional norms and values.”48 As a result, India’s economic growth has produced the twin effects of extreme inequality coupled with the degradation of the country’s environment and natural resources.49 To make things worse, in the midst of the COVID-​19 pandemic in March 2020, the Modi government introduced amendments

Globalization of Environmental Justice    491 to Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA), the effect of which is likely to be “the opposite of the very raison d’etre of the EIA—​protection, and promotion of environment and local communities.”50 The government suppressed voices of dissent with a heavy hand, including the Fridays for Future India (FFI), which launched a public campaign requesting fellow Indians to email the federal Environment Minister asking him to reconsider the proposed EIA amendments. In return, the Delhi police accused the FFI of undermining the “sovereignty and integrity of India” and threatened the FFI with legal action under the UAPA, the anti-​terrorism law mentioned earlier. Moreover, “no one in the news television business would touch the story,” because the Environment Minister also happened to be the Information and Broadcasting minister.51 In India, “neo-​liberalism” manifests in the form of blatant illiberalism and oppressive state power that is used to promote extractivism and suppress dissent.

Conclusion The preceding analyses show that EJ in the United States has been shaped by the nature of past and present racial inequalities, the nature of capitalism, and the class relations it engenders. Each of these factors matters in the Indian case, too, but inequality and capitalism are institutionalized very differently in India and in many other counties. This is why any investigations of a global EJ movement must pay greater attention to comparative politics and political economy. Such comparative studies will be complementary to an analysis of the plural frames, strategies, and scope of EJ advocacy that anthropologists, critical geographers, and political theorists focus on. While there has been significant focus on multiple meanings that different groups attribute to the environment, more work is needed for a finer understanding of the intertwined nature of social, economic, and political inequalities that produce environmental injustices. To this end, this chapter outlined the PEPI framework and applied it to a comparative analysis of EJ debates in the United States and India. The comparative analysis presented here investigated EJ advocacy with a specific focus on the differences in institutions, policies, and programs (or lack thereof) between these two democracies, each with its own set of challenges. While recent scholarship on the globalization of EJ emphasizes the shared experiences of injustices in various sites, the comparative EJ analysis presented in this chapter also accounts for missing policies and institutions (e.g., the CRA) that are often taken for granted in EJ scholarship in the United States. More importantly, a key insight from the PEPI framework is to scrutinize the unstated assumptions of liberal institutionalism that underlie the juridico-​legal EJ advocacy in the United States. EJ has yet to be institutionalized within national and state-​level policy and programmatic frameworks in India, where the agencies and institutions of the state are implicated in frequent EJ violations. Under these conditions, “working with” or “confronting” the state does not exhaust the realm of necessary action. Accordingly, comparative EJ scholarship could usefully investigate how the entrenched configurations of social, political, legal, and institutional factors shape EJ outcomes. While this does not preclude cross-​national quantitative analyses, it does highlight the need for greater caution against using coarse proxies

492   Prakash Kashwan for measuring EJ policies, institutions, and outcomes. The goals of mapping, modeling, and analyzing the complexity of EJ struggles and their representations within the political arena should be at the center of comparative EJ research.

Notes 1. https://​www.usn​ews.com/​news/​us/​artic​les/​2020-​02-​28/​apa​che-​tribe-​marc​hes-​to-​prot​ ect-​sac​red-​ariz​ona-​site-​from-​cop​per-​mine 2. https://​dotea​rth.blogs.nyti​mes.com/​2015/​07/​17/​from-​times-​squ​are-​to-​the-​capi​tol-​apa​ che-​pro​test​ors-​fight-​u-​s-​land-​swap-​with-​min​ing-​comp​any/​ 3. https://​ejat​las.org/​about 4. This draws on the discussions developed in Kashwan (2017a, 2020). 5. https://​blogs.sci​enti​f ica​meri​can.com/​voi​ces/​3-​t ri​b es-​at-​t he-​heart-​of-​t he-​f rack​ing-​ boom/​; https://​www.ecowa​tch.com/​frack​ing-​boom-​in-​north-​dak​ota-​has-​heavy-​imp​act-​ on-​nat​ive-​americ​ans-​188​1673​245.html 6. This discussion draws on the IAD’s legacy of the research on common pool resources (Ostrom 2007). 7. See https://​www.epa.gov/​envir​onme​ntal​just​ice/​enviro​nmen​tal-​just​ice-​timel​ine [For more detailed timelines, refer to https://​huma​nrig​hts.fhi.duke.edu/​enviro​nmen​tal-​just​ ice-​resour​ces/​; https://​www.arc​gis.com/​apps/​Casc​ade/​index.html?appid=​b3ab6​8df3​7ff4​ ec3b​8bdd​1569​2917​4aa] 8. https://​w ww.col​orli​nes.com/​artic​les/​w ill-​epas-​enviro​nmen​t al-​just​ice-​outl​ast-​lisa-​ jack​son 9. https://​w ww.nyti​mes.com/​inte​ract​ive/​2020/​clim​ate/​trump-​envi​ronm​ent-​rollba​cks. html?mtr​ref=​www.bing.coma​ndas​setT​ype=​REGIW​ALL 10. https://​non​prof​i tqu​arte​rly.org/​enviro​nmen​tal-​just​ice-​movem​ent-​felt-​heat-​2017/​ 11. https://​w ww.reut​ers.com/​arti​cle/​usa-​biden-​envi​ronm​ent/​biden-​shortl​ist-​for-​white-​ house-​ key- ​ e nviro​ n men​ t al- ​ p ost- ​ s hows- ​ focus- ​ on- ​ e nviro​ n men​ t al- ​ just ​ i ce- ​ i dUSKB​ N28B​4LN 12. https://​www.whi​teho​use.gov/​brief​i ng-​room/​sta​teme​nts-​relea​ses/​2021/​01/​27/​fact-​sheet-​ presid​ent-​biden-​takes-​execut​ive-​acti​ons-​to-​tac​kle-​the-​clim​ate-​cri​sis-​at-​home-​and-​abr​ oad-​cre​ate-​jobs-​and-​rest​ore-​sci​enti​fic-​integr​ity-​acr​oss-​fede​ral-​gov​ernm​ent/​ 13. https://​www.epa.gov/​newsr​elea​ses/​epa-​announ​ces-​select​ion-​155-​gra​nts-​comm​unit​ies-​ rece​ive-​over-​65-​mill​ion-​total-​grant 14. https://​india.monga​bay.com/​2020/​12/​peo​ple-​liv​ing-​near-​min​ing-​act​ivit​ies-​at-​increa​sed-​ risk-​of-​disea​ses-​says-​study/​ 15. https://​www.nyti​mes.com/​inte​ract​ive/​2020/​12/​17/​world/​asia/​india-​pollut​ion-​ine​qual​ ity.html 16. https://​www.hrw.org/​rep​ort/​2014/​08/​25/​clean​ing-​human-​waste/​man​ual-​sca​veng​ing-​ caste-​and-​dis​crim​inat​ion-​india# 17. https://​times​ofin​dia.ind​iati​mes.com/​city/​delhi/​fix-​blame-​for-​dea​ths-​send-​top-​offici​als-​ to-​jail-​expe​rts/​arti​cles​how/​78757​886.cms 18. https://​www.thehi​ndu.com/​news/​natio​nal/​110-​dea​ths-​by-​clean​ing-​sew​ers-​sep​tic-​tanks-​ in-​2019/​arti​cle3​0795​201.ece 19. https://​www.rmaw​ard.asia/​award​ees/​bezw​ada-​wil​son/​ 20. http://​ces.iisc.ernet.in/​hpg/​envis/​doc97h​tml/​envenv​627.html

Globalization of Environmental Justice    493 21. https://​w ww.hrw.org/​news/​2019/​12/​11/​india-​citi​zens​hip-​bill-​discri​mina​tes-​agai​nst-​ musl​ims 22. https://​www.ilo.org/​dyn/​nat​lex/​natl​ex4.det​ail?p_​l​ang=​ena​ndp_​isn=​93590 23. https://​w ww.nbcn​e ws.com/​news/​world/​india-​dal​its-​still-​feel-​b ot​tom-​caste-​lad​der-​ n1239​846 24. https://​in.one.un.org/​page/​break​ing-​free-​reh​abil​itat​ing-​man​ual-​sca​veng​ers/​ 25. This argument draws on a formulation by Dalit activist Bezwada Wilson https://​www. rmaw​ard.asia/​award​ees/​bezw​ada-​wil​son/​ 26. https://​www.theg​uard​ian.com/​glo​bal-​deve​lopm​ent/​pove​rty-​matt​ers/​2013/​aug/​21/​india-​ dong​ria-​kondh-​veda​nta-​resour​ces-​min​ing 27. Sethi, N. “After Activists, Retd Officials File Plea Against Forest Act.” The Times of India. 2008. https://​www.pres​srea​der.com/​india/​the-​times-​of-​india-​new-​delhi-​edit​ion/​20080​ 715/​2818​6581​9241​682 28. Such resistance to the FRA is comparable to the police unions fighting off criminal justice reforms in the United States. https://​www.nyti​mes.com/​2020/​06/​06/​us/​pol​ice-​uni​ ons-​minn​eapo​lis-​kroll.html 29. https://​www.busin​ess-​stand​ard.com/​arti​cle/​curr​ent-​affa​irs/​sc-​evict​ion-​order-​lik​ely-​to-​ imp​act-​1-​89-​mn-​tri​bal-​for​est-​dwell​ing-​famil​ies-​119​0221​0113​2_​1.html 30. https://​thew​ire.in/​rig​hts/​evict​ion-​covid-​19-​lockd​own-​hlrn-​rep​ort 31. https://​www.gre​enpe​ace.org/​india/​en/​press/​3100/​we-​will-​not-​allow-​min​ing-​in-​mahan-​ mahan-​sangha​rsh-​sam​iti/​ 32. https://​www.gre​enpe​ace.org/​india/​en/​story/​2665/​for​ged-​sig​natu​res-​the-​basis-​of-​mah​ ans-​cleara​nce/​ 33. https:// ​ w ww.climat​ e cha​ ngen​ e ws.com/​ 2 015/​ 03/​ 2 4/​ c oal-​ m in​ i ng-​ b an​ ned-​ i n-​ i nd​ i as-​ mahan-​for​est/​ 34. https:// ​ w ww.climat​ e cha​ ngen​ e ws.com/​ 2 015/​ 03/​ 2 4/​ c oal-​ m in​ i ng-​ b an​ ned-​ i n-​ i nd​ i as-​ mahan-​for​est/​ 35. https://​pul​itze​rcen​ter.org/​report​ing/​coal-​plant-​endang​ers-​fore​sts-​wildl​ife-​peo​ple-​and-​ india-​doe​snt-​even-​need-​it-​expe​rts-​say 36. https://​crawf​ord.anu.edu.au/​news-​eve​nts/​eve​nts/​15243/​anti-​coal-​anti-​poor-​const​ruct​ ing-​transn​atio​nal-​narrat​ive-​clim​ate-​just​ice 37. https://​w ww.newin​dian​expr​ess.com/​nat​ion/​2020/​sep/​19/​cen​tre-​reje​cts-​gre​enpe​ace-​ study-​which-​cla​ims-​india-​is-​wor​lds-​larg​est-​emit​ter-​of-​anthro​poge​nic-​so2-​2199​171.html 38. https://​www.nyti​mes.com/​2019/​11/​15/​world/​asia/​india-​pollut​ion.html 39. https://​w ww.down​toea​r th.org.in/​blog/​p ollut​ion/​air-​p ollut​ion-​does-​kill-​p eo​ple-​mr-​ harsh-​vard​han-​64357 40. https://​www.decca​nher​ald.com/​speci​als/​insi​ght/​pollut​ion-​spir​als-​out-​of-​cont​rol-​as-​gov​ ernm​ent-​sle​eps-​at-​the-​wheel-​909​743.html 41. https://​w ww.hrw.org/​news/​2020/​08/​19/​india-​conte​mpt-​con​vict ​ion-​t hreat​ens-​f ree-​ spe​ech 42. https://​www.thea​tlan​tic.com/​intern​atio​nal/​arch​ive/​2021/​06/​india-​democr​acy-​free​dom-​ prot​est/​619​185/​ 43. Letter from Martin R. Castro, Chairman, US Commission on Civil Rights’ Report on Environmental Justice: Examining the Environmental Protection Agency’s Compliance and Enforcement of Title VI and Executive Order 12,898 44. https://​earth​just​ice.org/​news/​press/​2020/​fede​ral-​court-​requi​res-​epa-​to-​enfo​rce-​civil-​ rig​hts

494   Prakash Kashwan 45. This does not apply to the tribal groups in Northeast India, where in several states tribals are the majority populations. But they are only 12 percent of the total population of Adivasis in India. 46. https://​thew​ire.in/​polit​ics/​dalit-​polit​ics-​chan​dra-​shek​har-​aazad 47. EPA Region 5 includes the states of Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio, and Wisconsin. 48. https://​www.newyor​ker.com/​tech/​ann​als-​of-​tec​hnol​ogy/​cent​ral-​ind​ias-​ugly-​fight-​for-​ enviro​nmen​tal-​just​ice 49. https://​yal​eglo​bal.yale.edu/​cont​ent/​grow​ing-​ine​qual​ity-​dulls-​ind​ias-​sheen 50. https://​www.busine​ssto​day.in/​curr​ent/​econ​omy-​polit​ics/​ind​ian-​econ​omy-​is-​govt-​using-​ enviro​nmen​tal-​laws-​to-​prot​ect-​pollut​ing-​ind​ustr​ies/​story/​409​308.html 51. https://​www.thequ​int.com/​voi​ces/​opin​ion/​how-​uapa-​was-​used-​on-​young-​enviro​nmen​ tali​sts-​frid​ays-​for-​fut​ure-​india-​and-​media-​didnt-​care

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498   Prakash Kashwan Sowers, Jeannie. “Environmental Activism in the Middle East and North Africa.” In Environmental Politics in the Middle East, Ed. Harry Verhoeven 27–​52. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018. Srivastava, Shilpi, Shibaji Bose, Devanathan Parthasarathy, and Lyla Mehta. “Climate Justice for Whom? Understanding the Vernaculars of Climate Action and Justice in Marginal Environments of India.” In Amber Huff and Lars Otto Naess, eds. Reframing Climate and Environmental Justice. IDS Bulletin: Transforming Development Knowledge 53 (2022): 101–123. Steinberg, Paul F., and Stacy D. VanDeveer. Comparative Environmental Politics: Theory, Practice, and Prospects, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012. Switzer, David. “Citizen Partisanship, Local Government, and Environmental Policy Implementation.” Urban Affairs Review 55 (2019): 675–​702. Tang, Ching-​ Ping, Shui-​ Yan Tang, and Chung-​ Yuan Chiu. “Inclusion, Identity, and Environmental Justice in New Democracies: The Politics of Pollution Remediation in Taiwan.” Comparative Politics 43 (2011): 333–​350. Taylor, Dorceta E. 2000. “The Rise of the Environmental Justice Paradigm: Injustice Framing and the Social Construction of Environmental Discourses.” American Behavioral Scientist 43: 508–​80. Taylor, Dorceta E. The State of Diversity in Environmental Organizations. Washington D.C: Green 2.0 (2014): 187. Thompson, Geneva E. B. “The Double-​Edged Sword of Sovereignty by the Barrel: How Native Nations Can Wield Environmental Justice in the Fight Against the Harms of Fracking.” UCLA Law Review 63 (2016): 1818. Weinthal, Erika, and Kate Watters. “Transnational Environmental Activism in Central Asia: The Coupling of Domestic Law and International Conventions.” Environmental Politics 19 (2010): 782–​807. Williams, Glyn, and Emma Mawdsley. “Postcolonial Environmental Justice: Government and Governance in India.” Geoforum 37 (2006): 660–​670.

Chapter 26

Rights of Nat u re Institutions, Law, and Policy for Sustainable Development Craig M. Kauffman In 2018, a community of Cofán Indigenous peoples in Ecuador’s Amazonian province of Sucumbios sued Ecuador’s Ministry of Mining, the Ministry of Environment, and other government agencies for issuing gold mining concessions in their ancestral territory. They argued that the resulting damage to the Aguarico River Basin violated the community’s rights to prior consultation, clean water, and a healthy environment. They also said it violated the Rights of Nature (RoN) recognized in Ecuador’s 2008 constitution, specifically the Aguarico River’s rights to exist, maintain its natural cycles, and be restored when damaged. When the Cofán won in lower court, the government appealed to the Sucumbios Provincial Court. Ecuador’s Sucumbios Provincial Court also ruled in the Cofán’s favor. The court rejected the government’s argument that prior consultation was not necessary because the mining activity did not take place within Cofán territory. The court emphasized that whether or not the mining occurred in a government-​recognized protected area was irrelevant since Ecuador’s constitution recognizes all Nature as having rights. The constitution also recognizes the interdependence of all living things, making human well-​being dependent on the health of the ecosystems on which humans depend for life. Consequently, the negative effects of gold mining on the Aguarico River’s basin directly threatened not just the Cofán’s right to water, but the rights of all the riverside communities in the Aguarico Basin. Furthermore, the court ruled that constitutionally protected rights, like the right to a dignified life, required guaranteeing a healthy, biodiverse environment where the Cofán could sustain itself according to custom. Consequently, the court ruled that the gold mining violated not just the Cofán’s community rights, but also the RoN, and Ecuador’s government had an obligation to protect these areas by prohibiting the exploration, exploitation, and marketing of gold. To this end, the court cancelled all 52 mining concessions that had been granted or were being processed for the 125 square miles of Cofán territory, and it prohibited the granting of new mining concessions. Moreover, the court ordered the government to repair the environmental damage caused by the mining operations (Sucumbios Provincial Court of Justice 2018).

500   Craig M. Kauffman Ecuador’s government appealed to the Constitutional Court, but the mining ban remained while the country awaited the ruling, still pending at the time of writing. The Cofán case illustrates how laws recognizing ecosystems as subjects with rights are increasingly being used to fight environmentally destructive behaviors. With the onset of climate change, the prospect of mass extinction, and the closing window of opportunity to take meaningful action, a growing number of communities, organizations, and governments around the world are calling for RoN to be legally recognized to help transform human systems (legal, political, economic, etc.) into ones that are ecologically sustainable. RoN advocates argue that conventional environmental laws (like the Clean Air Act and Endangered Species Act) are unable to bring the necessary transformation because they legalize the destructive behaviors producing the problems, thereby obstructing efforts to prevent ecosystem collapse (Margil 2017). Instead, these advocates are creating new laws that recognize ecosystems as subjects with inherent rights that cannot be violated and appealing to communities, government agencies, and courts to protect those rights. Since 2006, when the first RoN law was adopted in Tamaqua Borough, Pennsylvania, RoN has gone from being a radical idea espoused only by a handful of marginalized actors to a legal strategy seriously considered in a wide variety of domestic and international policy arenas. In January 2021, at least 185 legal provisions (e.g., constitutions, laws, regulatory policies, and court rulings) recognizing RoN existed in 17 countries spanning five continents, and 50 more RoN laws were pending in a dozen other countries.1 RoN is supported in UN Secretary General reports and General Assembly resolutions,2 by environmental nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) like the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) (2016) and by moral leaders like Pope Francis (2015). It is recognized by the Inter-​American Court of Human Rights (2017) and acknowledged by the UN Agenda 2030 (United Nations 2015), the Convention on Biological Diversity (COP 11 Decision XI/​22), and other international texts related to sustainable development. After defining RoN, this chapter examines aspects of RoN relevant to comparative environmental politics, including the types of actors advancing RoN, the governance structures and pathways used to adopt RoN laws, and the implications of structuring RoN laws as unique substantive rights for ecosystems versus extending legal personhood (a set of rights designed for humans). I conclude by examining the relationship between RoN and human rights, including environmental rights, Indigenous rights, and economic rights like property rights.

What Are Rights of Nature? In practice, people use the term “rights of nature” to refer to two things that are conceptually different: (1) a legal philosophy and (2) legal provisions that codify this philosophy by recognizing ecosystems as subjects with rights (also see Gellers and Jeffords chapter, this volume). It is important to distinguish between these two meanings in order to understand debates regarding how to structure the RoN laws discussed later. Often, “RoN” is used to refer to a legal philosophy known as Earth jurisprudence (Berry 1999; Burdon 2011). Earth jurisprudence asserts there is a lawful order to the universe that maintains a “web of life” (Hosken 2019). All elements of Nature, including humans, are

Rights of Nature    501 inextricably connected into this order and linked to one another through interdependent relationships. Consequently, human well-​being depends on the well-​being of the ecosystems that sustain all life. Earth jurisprudence argues that “humans must adapt their legal, political, economic, and social systems to be consistent with” the way the natural world actually works rather than fighting against this lawful order and trying to force Nature to conform to human will (Cullinan 2011, p. 13). This is the fundamental transformation in systems and paradigms that RoN advocates believe is necessary to address looming climate and biodiversity crises. Western law largely pretends that the laws of physics, chemistry, and biology do not apply. David Boyd notes that this produces “outcomes that are at odds with reality. For example, any biologist will tell you that humans are animals. But the law disagrees” (Boyd 2017, p. xxv). One problem is that the law has not evolved to keep pace with scientific advancements. Today’s legal system is based on a mechanistic view of the world that emerged during the scientific revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which views Nature as a machine composed of fragmented, independent parts. At that time, lawyers “fragmented the legal order from a holistic system of customary laws adapted to the practical requirements of human relationships into an aggregate of component parts” (Ito 2020, pp. 321–​322). The previous view of the world as a living organism was replaced with a new view of the world as stocks of independent resources to be extracted to produce economic wealth. Scientists now understand that the world is not a collection of discrete parts, but rather “a dynamic and fluid interconnected community of life best understood in terms of patterns and relationships. Science also acknowledges that Nature sustains life through ecological principles that are generative rather than extractive” (Ito 2020, p. 9). If the law is to help solve the problems of climate change and mass extinction, legal systems need to be restructured to reflect the fact that Nature is comprised of holistic, dynamic, multidimensional, complex adaptive systems, and that human societies are among these systems (i.e., human societies are a subset of Nature) (Ito 2020, p. 315). The law must value Nature (understood as nested systems) primarily for its ability to generate the conditions for life, rather than providing stocks of resources to be extracted. According to Boyd (2017, p. xxii–​xxiii), the disconnect between Western law (including environmental law) and the laws governing the natural world stems from three related ideas. The first is anthropocentrism—​the widespread human belief that we are separate from, and superior to, the rest of the natural world. . . . The second is that everything in Nature, animate and inanimate, constitutes our property, which we have the right to use as we see fit. The third idea is that we can and should pursue limitless economic growth as the paramount objective of modern society.

Earth jurisprudence scholars argue that the embedding of these ideas into human governance systems (including environmental law) has caused the systematic destruction of ecosystems needed to sustain life. For a time, human societies simply moved on to other ecosystems. The problem is that this destruction is now happening at a planetary scale. As the saying goes, there is no Planet B. Earth jurisprudence aims to fundamentally transform legal, socio-​ economic, and governance systems, replacing these three destructive ideas with a different paradigm that prioritizes sustaining ecosystem functioning. Iorns Magallanes and Sheehan (2017,

502   Craig M. Kauffman pp. 74–​75) summarize the fundamental principles of this paradigm, developed by Thomas Berry (1999), as follows: • The universe is the primary source of law; human laws and legal and governance systems are only derivative. Berry describes the universe as a “communion of subjects” rather than a “collection of objects,” and argues that Nature has inherent value and an inherent right to exist. . . . [H]‌umans must live in accordance with the relationship and principles that constitute the Earth community, and human governance systems at all times must take account of the interests of the whole Earth community. . . . Implications of these fundamental principles include requirements that humans must: • Determine the lawfulness of human conduct by whether or not it strengthens or weakens the relationship that constitute the Earth community; • Maintain a dynamic balance between the rights of humans and those of other members of the Earth community on the basis of what is best for the Earth as a whole.

More than rights, Earth jurisprudence stresses the responsibilities that humans have toward other members of the ecosystems where they live—​what ecological scientists call “biotic communities” (Mucina 2019)—​due to the fact that all members are tied together through interdependent, reciprocal relationships. Rather than exponential growth in consumption and production, Earth jurisprudence prioritizes maintaining balance and a dynamic equilibrium within healthy ecosystems, encapsulated by the catchphrase “living in harmony with Nature.” Recognizing that human well-​being depends on the well-​being of ecosystems that provide the conditions for life, Earth jurisprudence places the well-​being of all members of the biotic community (including humans) ahead of human self-​interest alone. Part of the paradigm change is this reconceptualization of human self-​interest. Western Earth jurisprudence scholars acknowledge that this paradigm is not really new. It is informed not only by ecological science and environmental ethics, but also by Indigenous knowledge and cultural systems dating back millennia (Berry 1999; Iorns Magallanes and Sheehan 2017, p. 74). Indeed, Indigenous movements like the Indigenous Environmental Network have been a driving force propelling the rise of RoN laws as well as the global RoN movement. While Indigenous RoN activists acknowledge that “rights” is a Western framing that historically has been used as a tool for colonial oppression, many see Earth jurisprudence as expressing their peoples’ cosmovision regarding the human–​Nature relationship and see RoN laws as a way to incorporate Indigenous values into Western law. For example, Casey Camp Horinek, a leader of both the Ponca Nation in Oklahoma and the global RoN movement, argues that “In passing the Rights of Nature into Ponca tribal law, for the first time we saw our Indigenous values and rights reflected in Western law. We are not people protecting Nature, we are Nature protecting itself. This is a powerful way to create system change.”3 Camp Horinek’s comments mirror those of other Indigenous leaders who talk about RoN as a way to change Western paradigms to be more consistent with the cosmovisions traditionally held by their peoples, which see humans as part of Nature, inextricably linked to the rest of the natural world through interdependent and reciprocal relationships (e.g., Pacari 2009; Goldtooth 2017). Legal provisions recognizing ecosystems as subjects with rights is the second way the term “RoN” is used. RoN legal provisions are not the only way to codify Earth jurisprudence principles, but they are the most common way of doing so in Western legal systems.

Rights of Nature    503 I emphasize the distinction between RoN as legal philosophy (Earth jurisprudence) and RoN as legal provision to highlight that the ultimate goal of the RoN movement is normative paradigm change: changing the way that people understand humans’ relationship with Nature and their responsibility toward it in order to inspire more ecologically sustainable behaviors. RoN legal provisions are seen as a tool to achieve this goal; they are not themselves the ultimate goal. As Thiel and Hallgren (2018, p. 64) write, “laws are not just passive reflections [of societal values], but themselves have a profound impact on morals, values and belief systems, the sense of right and wrong. . . . Law in this view is central to the project of changing society; only by transforming law will we be able to transform society.”

Actors, Networks, and Pathways The explosion of RoN legal provisions around the world is facilitated by transnational RoN networks like the Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature (GARN).4 GARN is a global hub connecting networks of Indigenous movements, environmental and human rights activists, community rights activists, lawyers, scientists, business leaders, and government leaders from more than 100 countries, all dedicated to advancing Earth jurisprudence by incorporating RoN into law and policy at all levels of governance around the world. Another key hub is the UN Harmony with Nature Program, which connects hundreds of RoN experts and provides a platform for integrating Earth jurisprudence into the UN system. The Ecological Law and Governance Association was formed by members of the IUCN’s World Commission on Environmental Law and has become an important hub connecting lawyers and academics. These and other global hubs connect many more regional and domestic RoN networks, creating a rapidly growing networked governance structure for advancing RoN (Kauffman 2020b). RoN laws have emerged through many different pathways owing to the distinct political conditions in different countries (Kauffman and Martin 2018, 2021). Early RoN laws in Ecuador, Bolivia, and New Zealand were created through unique and contingent processes that opened a window of opportunity for codifying Indigenous views of humans’ relationship to Nature in Western law (i.e., writing new constitutions in Ecuador and Bolivia; treaty settlements with Maori in New Zealand; see Kauffman and Martin 2018). These rare events are not easily replicated. However, this has not stopped the rise of RoN legal provisions around the world, which have largely emerged through pathways other than national legislatures. One pathway common in the United States is the ballot initiative. Lawyers from the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF), the Earth Law Center, and other organizations have trained and activated a national network of community activists who are advancing ballot initiatives across the country to create local ordinances recognizing RoN. Believing that the political opportunity structures in both national and state legislatures are closed, US RoN advocates are instead appealing directly to voters. By January 2021, at least 100 such ballot measures had passed. Outside the United States, RoN advocates have had more success cultivating allies in national and subnational legislatures and working with them to draft RoN laws. The work

504   Craig M. Kauffman of Ugandan NGO Advocates for Natural Resources and Development, supported by the Gaia Foundation and others, led Uganda’s 2019 National Environment Law to recognize RoN. The Earth Law Center helped legislators in the Mexican state of Colima draft a RoN constitutional amendment, adopted in 2019. Mexico City did the same in 2017. As a result of similar efforts by RoN advocates, municipal and state governments in 14 countries have recognized RoN in their constitutions or regulations. Tribal nations in North America have recognized RoN in tribal law as a tool for fighting against environmental degradation caused by fracking, mining, oil transport, and industrial agriculture. By January 2021, seven tribes—​the Ho-​Chunk Nation, Ponca Nation, the White Earth Band of Ojibwe, the ʔEsdilagh First Nation of Canada, and the Yurok, Nez Perce, and Menominee Tribes—​had amended their constitutions or passed laws recognizing RoN. An alternative to working with legislatures is to activate networks of executive branch bureaucrats with the authority to recognize RoN in public policy even without creating a new law. For example, lawyers from the Earth Law Center worked with Santa Monica city officials to incorporate RoN into their Sustainable City Plan (City of Santa Monica 2013). The Australian Earth Law Alliance similarly works with local officials to incorporate RoN into policy. The courts offer yet another pathway. Since 2016, a number of courts have issued rulings recognizing RoN even though their countries have no laws explicitly recognizing RoN. For example, Colombia’s Constitutional Court recognized the Atrato River as a legal person with rights, while the country’s Supreme Court did the same for the Amazon rainforest. Bangladesh’s High Court similarly recognized the rights of all Bangladeshi rivers. Indian courts have recognized the Ganga and Yamuna Rivers, the Himalayan mountains and glaciers, and the watersheds these glaciers feed as legal persons with rights. Kauffman and Martin (2019, 2021) show how judges are strategically interpreting existing laws to justify recognizing RoN, causing the legal doctrines supporting RoN to evolve, in particular by grafting it onto human rights, a topic I return to later. Courts’ growing recognition of RoN illustrates the power of training judges in Earth jurisprudence, as the Earth Law Center and others have done.

Comparing Rights of Nature Laws: Two Models Because RoN legal provisions have arisen through different pathways under distinct domestic conditions, RoN is constructed differently in different places. Kauffman and Martin (2018, 2021) present a framework for comparing RoN legal provisions and identify two ideal models. The “Nature’s Rights” model is illustrated by early RoN laws in Ecuador, Bolivia, and the United States. Here, all of Nature (within the legal jurisdiction) is recognized as having rights. Most importantly, these laws recognize unique substantive rights, including ecosystems’ right to exist, to maintain the integrity and functioning of their cycles, and the right to evolve naturally and be restored when damaged—​what Thomas Berry calls “the right to fulfill [their] role in the ever-​renewing processes of the Earth community” (Berry 2001, p. 1). In addition, these early laws empowered any person to speak on behalf of Nature

Rights of Nature    505 to defend Nature’s rights. Consequently, the model tends to address RoN reactively, with people seeking to defend Nature’s rights in court when violations are imminent or have already occurred. By contrast, the “Legal Personhood” model (illustrated by legal provisions in New Zealand, Colombia, India, and elsewhere) recognizes particular ecosystems as legal persons. Legal personhood does not recognize unique substantive rights for ecosystems but merely grants ecosystems the same rights and liabilities held by humans and corporations, including the right to own property, incur debts, petition the courts and administrative agencies, and receive reparations for damages should a court rule in their favor. These laws do not guarantee ecosystems’ right to maintain their integrity or be restored. However, specific guardians are not only appointed to speak on behalf of an ecosystem, but they are obliged to do so in both legal and policy arenas. Often, these guardians are embedded in new governance institutions charged with managing the ecosystem in a way that ensures the health and well-​being of the ecosystem. This gives the ecosystem a voice (via its guardians) in decision-​making processes regarding the management of the ecosystem, allowing RoN to be protected proactively, thus reducing the need to turn to the courts. Due to space constraints, I address the implication of recognizing unique substantive rights versus extending legal personhood to ecosystems, noting that Kauffman and Martin (2019, 2021) analyze the impacts of guardianship arrangements and other structural differences. It is worth considering how the legal personhood model emerged. New Zealand’s pioneering legal personhood provisions were modeled on the concept of “legal fiction”—​the practice of legally treating non-​human entities (e.g., corporations) as if they were human (i.e., extending human rights to non-​human entities).5 Following the New Zealand laws, courts in Colombia, India, and Bangladesh issued rulings recognizing various ecosystems (e.g., rivers, the Amazon Basin, the Himalaya mountain range) as legal persons, despite the fact that these countries had no RoN laws. Citing the New Zealand laws, these courts interpreted existing laws regarding environmental protection and human rights to justify extending legal personhood to ecosystems (Kauffman and Martin 2019). The important point here is that, in the absence of laws recognizing distinct substantive rights for ecosystems, the courts simply extended the same rights possessed by humans to ecosystems, fitting RoN into the existing anthropocentric legal framework. This has caused the jurisprudence underlying RoN to evolve in a way that many scholars and advocates find problematic (e.g., Grear 2019; O’Donnell 2019; Margil 2019).

The Problem with Structuring RoN as Legal Personhood Because legal personhood is already established in law and has a long history of being applied to non-​human entities, it is more easily transferable from one legal system to another. This no doubt facilitated the rapid proliferation of RoN legal provisions. However, legal personhood establishes RoN stripped of Earth jurisprudence content. I argue that this is problematic and potentially counterproductive, both for achieving RoN advocates’ goal of transforming paradigms and systems and for environmental protection more generally.

506   Craig M. Kauffman First, the language and conceptual framing of legal personhood distorts the relationship between humans and other members of biotic communities identified by Earth jurisprudence and ecological science. It anthropomorphizes ecosystems in a way that reproduces the disconnect between human law and the laws governing the natural world, recreating the problems that plague conventional environmental law. This can be seen through the Indian court ruling granting legal personhood to the Ganga and Yamuna Rivers. On March 20, 2017, the High Court in the Indian State of Uttarakhand declared the Ganga and Yamuna Rivers to be “juristic/​legal persons/​living entities having the status of a legal person with all corresponding rights, duties and liabilities of a living person in order to preserve and conserve [the] river[s]‌Ganga and Yamuna” (Salim v. State of Uttarakhand 2017, p. 11). Noting that the rivers’ well-​being is threatened due to neglect, the Uttarakhand High Court invoked the legal doctrine in loco parentis (Latin for “in the place of a parent”) to make a set of government bodies and officers responsible for acting on behalf of the rivers for their protection and conservation. Courts commonly use this legal principle to appoint guardians for children or incapacitated people who cannot defend themselves. Adopting the same logic, the court appointed Uttarakhand’s Chief Secretary, the Advocate General of Uttarakhand, and the Director of Namami Gange (the central government initiative to clean up the river) as guardians. While no doubt well-​intentioned, the use of in loco parentis illustrates the problems of inserting RoN into existing anthropocentric legal frameworks. It frames humans as the powerful parent while Nature is the helpless child. This notion of legal guardianship is appropriate among humans but violates fundamental Earth jurisprudence principles when applied to the human–​Nature relationship. Nature knows better than humans how its ecosystems should function and evolve. And given that Nature provides the conditions needed to sustain human life, Nature is better understood as the parent in the human–​ Nature relationship. From the Earth jurisprudence perspective, guardianship is not about managing Nature like a parent would manage a child, but rather guarding the relationship between humans and other members of the biotic community.6 The goal is managing human behavior to maintain balance so that the ecosystem on which all members (including humans) rely for their well-​being continues to function. By distorting this understanding of what guardianship is about, legal personhood undermines the goal of normative and system transformation at the heart of the RoN project. A second problem with legal personhood is that it creates legal liabilities for ecosystems. This has already produced perverse incentives, including in the Uttarakhand High Court ruling. The in loco parentis doctrine requires guardians to assume the liabilities of their charges. The Uttarakhand authorities appointed as guardians recognized that this is problematic when applied to the human–​Nature relationship. They filed a petition with India’s Supreme Court to overturn the Uttarakhand High Court ruling. Among other concerns, the petition complains that if the rivers flood and someone dies (as regularly happens), victims’ families could potentially sue for damages against the Chief Secretary. The petition asks the Supreme Court to determine whether the state government (as the rivers’ “legal parents”) would be liable to bear the financial burden of harms caused to humans by the river flooding as part of the natural water cycle (State of Uttarakhand v. Salim 2017). The idea that ecosystems have the same responsibilities to humans that humans have toward each other is absurd. We cannot hold a river liable for flooding or hold the climate

Rights of Nature    507 accountable for damage caused by sea level rise. The idea of holding ecosystems accountable to human law merely reproduces the misguided idea that humans can bend the laws of Nature to their will. But as Bill McKibben (2017) notes, “physics doesn’t do compromise.” The fact that ecosystems do not bear human responsibilities does not mean that ecosystems should not have rights. It just means we should not extend human rights to Nature. Because each member of a biotic community plays a unique role in maintaining the functioning of an ecosystem, each member has unique responsibilities to the whole community and, in turn, unique rights. Consequently, RoN laws should be structured in a way that recognizes different elements of Nature as having distinct substantive rights. To paraphrase Christopher Stone (1972) and Thomas Berry (2001), trees should have tree rights, rivers should have river rights, fish should have fish rights, humans should have human rights, and ecosystems should have ecosystem rights. “The difference is qualitative, not quantitative” (Berry 2001, p. 1). Beyond philosophical arguments, there is evidence that granting legal personhood to ecosystems without recognizing their own substantive rights can undermine societal values favoring environmental protection. Erin O’Donnell (2019) examines the historical performance of Environmental Water Managers (EWMs), created in the mid-​1990s, as a proxy for studying the effect of legal personhood for rivers. EWMs are organizations with legal personhood status that manage water for environmental benefit. They have essentially the same legal form as rivers with legal personhood status, represented by human guardians. She finds that in many cases EWMs created new cultural narratives that framed river ecosystems as just another water user competing with other water users for water resources—​“a mere participant in the water market” (O’Donnell 2019, p. 7). Legal personhood anthropomorphized ecosystems in a way that stripped them of their status as worthy of protection. Framed as a competitor in water markets, humans began to see Nature as a legal entity that could (and should) protect itself and so no longer required human protection. O’Donnell shows that in some cases this produced a weakening of statutory environmental protections.

Legal Personhood in Indigenous Societies O’Donnell acknowledges that legal personhood has worked better in places like New Zealand, where ecosystems (represented by their guardians) are inserted into collaborative integrated ecosystem management bodies that operate according to Indigenous cultural values rather than the logic of market competition. I argue that the reason legal personhood is less problematic in New Zealand is because Earth jurisprudence is incorporated into New Zealand’s RoN laws via provisions that recognize Maori conceptions of the human–​Nature relationship and that allow the recovery of Indigenous customary governance systems that are consistent with Earth jurisprudence. This suggests that the purpose of RoN legal provisions may be different in Indigenous and non-​Indigenous societies. In non-​Indigenous societies, RoN legal provisions are seen as a tool for inserting Earth jurisprudence into legal, socio-​economic, and governance systems. But for some Indigenous peoples, the utility is merely to remove legal obstacles to recovering ancestral knowledge and practices that are

508   Craig M. Kauffman consistent with Earth jurisprudence. In these cases, legal personhood provisions may be less problematic because they play a distinct role in advancing Earth jurisprudence. New Zealand’s Te Urewera Act illustrates what this looks like in practice (see Kauffman 2020a for detailed analysis). New Zealand’s 2014 Te Urewera Act gained international attention because it was the first national law to recognize an ecosystem, outside of the Andes, as a legal subject with rights (showing that RoN was more than a regional oddity). This law emerged from treaty settlement negotiations resolving historical Treaty of Waitangi claims of the Tūhoe Iwi (tribe) in relation to the forest Te Urewera, the Tūhoe homeland. The act removed Te Urewera’s status as a national park and recognized the forest as a legal person with “all the rights, powers, duties, and liabilities of a legal person” (s 11(1)). The Tūhoe never advocated for this RoN provision. It was proposed by government negotiators as a strategy for overcoming an obstacle in the treaty negotiations regarding ownership of the land (Kauffman and Martin 2018, pp. 57–​58). In hindsight, Tūhoe leaders now see the law’s RoN provision as important not because it grants rights to the forest (allowing it to own itself), but because it removed the preexisting legal framework, providing space for the Tūhoe to create a new governance system rooted in Tūhoe culture (and Earth jurisprudence).7 Kirsti Luke, CEO of Te Uru Taumatua (the Tūhoe tribal governance body), explains the purpose and impact of the legal personhood provision in this way: Our reason for enabling a legal personality to apply to land was to withdraw the law—​to filter out the motives, the agendas, the objectives that have been created by somebody else’s law. . . . This legal personality is a piece of law to remove human transactions, human thinking, human self-​interest from land in order that our Indigenous beliefs, the care, the kinship, the connectedness, the want to share things with each other, to hold things in common, to be concerned to build a future made up of strong, giving people. Strong humans are the things that manage excessive lifestyles. Technology does not. . . . And we have seen no other way than to step into somebody else’s courtroom, and ask that court to remove their rules in order that mine can apply. So Te Urewera is not property. An ownership situation can only ever see Mother Earth as property, and property is something that is human made. Te Urewera is not property. Te Urewera is not real estate. Te Urewera is my mother. She gives me life and continues to. She is the thing that gives me enjoyment. She reminds me that I am connected to these plants and other creatures, and that I love them, and that they love me. These are things that humans are forgetting how to do. (Luke 2018)

The Te Urewera case illustrates how RoN laws can be compatible with Indigenous rights, like self-​determination and preservation of culture, when they are used to create legal space for recovering Indigenous customs and values consistent with Earth jurisprudence. The Te Urewera Act empowered the Tūhoe to retake their traditional place as kaitiaki, or guardians of Te Urewera (Kauffman 2020a). By delisting Te Urewera as a national park, removing it from the existing environmental management legal system, and empowering the Tūhoe to serve as Te Urewera’s guardians, the act created a legal space for the Tūhoe to restore their self-​determination (mana motuhake) and begin the long process of recovering ancestral knowledge, customs, and practices to reconnect their people to the land. The Tūhoe’s management plan for Te Urewera (Te Kawa o Te Urewera) shows how the governance system based on Tūhoe values contains Earth jurisprudence principles. The plan emphasizes that Te Urewera is not a set of discrete resources to be managed and used

Rights of Nature    509 but a “living system [whose] balance and a rhythm that is mysterious and imperceptible to human senses” (Te Urewera Board 2017, p. 37). The plan’s central principle is that “Te Kawa is about the management of people for the benefit of the land—​it is not about land management” (Te Urewera Board 2017, p. 1). It recognizes that humans cannot control Nature but instead have an interest in managing their own behaviors in a way that maintains balance and order in the ecosystems on which they depend for life. This principle reverses the National Parks Act’s focus on managing land “for the benefit, use, and enjoyment of the public” (s 4). Consequently, the criteria used to make decisions in Te Urewera differs in subtle but important ways from the approach taken by New Zealand’s Department of Conservation (DOC) when Te Urewera was a national park (detailed in Kauffman 2020a). Before an action is taken, the Tūhoe ask whether the purpose is to benefit Te Urewera or people. Actions to benefit Te Urewera are generally taken. Actions to benefit people will only be taken if the impact on Te Urewera is limited and does not upset balance in the ecosystem.8 Dealing with the forest’s possum population provides one example of how governance has changed. DOC considered possums to be the main “pest” in Te Urewera. Possums were introduced to New Zealand in 1858 to establish a fur trapping trade. Because possums have no natural predators in Te Urewera (besides humans), their population skyrocketed, threatening native bird and plant species. DOC approached this as a “pest control” problem and employed aerial spraying of 1080 (a poison: a synthetic form of sodium fluoroacetate). Although extremely harmful to the environment (and human health), DOC sprayed 1080 because it was the cheapest approach. The Tūhoe view toward possums is more complicated. On one hand, humility toward Nature makes many Tūhoe uncomfortable with treating animals as “pests.” As Kirsti Luke notes, Because I’m a human I take responsibility for causing all of this development and pushing all of these animals into a corner. Everybody now calls them pests. Because I took this land around here where ordinarily they could have lived in balance because there was enough land to go around. I took and ate up all of the land to put my houses on and my farms and now I’ve got the cheek to turn around and call that possum a pest. . . . We do not manage the land. So our business—​our number one pest control intent is to make harder, stronger, responsible humans. (Quoted in Crimmel and Goeckeritz 2020, p. 567)

On the other hand, there is a recognition that because possums have no other natural predators in Te Urewera, their rapid population growth could threaten the forest ecosystem if left unchecked. Possums, as well as rats and stoats, eat regenerating growth in the forest and eat the eggs of native bird species at a level that could lead to extinction. By killing birds that normally spread seeds that help the forest regenerate, possums have a system-​wide impact. Consequently, the Tūhoe do work to limit the possum population, but through trapping and hunting. While this is extremely labor-​intensive, cost is not an issue because hunting possum provides a sustainable livelihood for many Tūhoe families. Tūhoe consume the meat and sell the fur to make blankets, hats, and other goods. My interviews with possum hunters suggest that possum hunting is not seen as a pest eradication exercise in the same way that DOC conceptualized it. But it also is not an economic exercise that might

510   Craig M. Kauffman incentivize Tūhoe to boost possum populations to maximize profits. Rather, Tūhoe hunters expressed a duty to help maintain the possum population at a level that will not overwhelm the ecosystem and cause other important species to go extinct. They emphasized that the Tūhoe are also part of the forest ecosystem and must live off the land, and they are the only natural predator of the possum. My impression is that the Tūhoe play a natural role in the forest’s food web so that the forest ecosystem can sustain itself, much like the role wolves play in Yellowstone park when they hunt deer. Importantly, they do so by minimizing their ecological impact (see Kauffman 2020a for examples). Controlling possum populations through hunting shows how the Tūhoe are reviving traditional practices of sustainably living off the land, which allows them to conduct ecologically sustainable practices rejected by DOC as too expensive. But it also illustrates the difference between policies that prioritize human benefits (e.g., minimizing economic costs) and those that prioritize ecosystem functioning. The point from the India and New Zealand comparison worth emphasizing here is that if the goal is transforming systems to be more ecologically sustainable—​changing the paradigm undergirding Western legal systems and societies—​then it is essential that RoN laws not be stripped of Earth jurisprudence content, as happened in India. The reason New Zealand does not fit O’Donnell’s cautionary tale is that Earth jurisprudence was inserted into New Zealand’s RoN laws via provisions recognizing Maori cosmovision and authorizing the recovery of traditional guardianship arrangements. Legal personhood for ecosystems is less problematic when accompanied by new governance institutions that manage ecosystems according to Indigenous cultural values consistent with Earth jurisprudence, as happened in Colombia and New Zealand (Kauffman and Martin 2019). But what about non-​Indigenous societies, where implementing Earth jurisprudence does not involve recovering ancestral knowledge but instead is about radically transforming systems according to a fundamentally different paradigm? Here, legal personhood simply adapts RoN legal provisions to fit within existing anthropocentric legal and socio-​economic systems. This will at best be meaningless and at worst produce perverse outcomes. In these cases, the transformative potential of RoN likely requires legal provisions recognizing Nature as possessing unique substantive rights and humans as possessing responsibilities toward Nature.

What Is the Relationship Between Rights of Nature and Human Rights? As the number of RoN laws increases, the question of what is the relationship between human rights and RoN is gaining practical importance. It also matters for how we understand sustainable development. The current sustainable development model portrays the environmental, social, and economic spheres as distinct and able to operate independently, represented by a Venn diagram with sustainability marked by the tiny area where the three spheres overlap (see Figure 26.1). This reproduces the mistaken mechanistic worldview reflected in Western legal systems. Mumta Ito (2020, p. 324) notes that “in reality the only circle that can operate

Rights of Nature    511 Current Sustainable Development Model Nature

Human Society

Rights of Nature Model Nature Human Society

Economy Economy

Figure 26.1  Relationship among natural, human, and economic systems. Source: Adapted from Mumta Ito 2020, p. 324.

independently is Nature, as the others are dependent on Nature for their existence.” Human societies cannot exist without Nature providing the conditions for life. Economic systems are social constructions and cannot exist without functioning societies. Consequently, a more accurate portrayal of the relationship between Nature, human society, and the economy is one of nested systems with a natural hierarchy (Ito 2020, p. 324). From the Earth jurisprudence perspective, this natural hierarchy of systems suggests a natural hierarchy of rights (Figure 26.2). According to Mumta Ito (2020, p. 325) The rights operate in synergy with each other, as competing rights would undermine the wellbeing and integrity of the whole. This model of nested rights brings a unifying overarching framework to the balancing of interests and weighing of divergent values, overcoming the existing fragmentation and imbalance. Economic rights that currently undermine human rights and Nature’s rights destabilize the whole system, and would no longer be in the public interest.

The implication is that achieving ecologically sustainable development (“development” that sustains ecosystem functioning) requires transforming legal, socio-​economic, and governance systems to reflect a hierarchy of rights that reflects the natural order of the world. Recent court rulings provide some signs that this hierarchy of rights associated with the RoN paradigm may be taking root in some legal systems, providing tentative evidence of potential early normative change. A few courts are recognizing that RoN is a necessary precondition for protecting human environmental rights. In 2018, 25 Colombian young people sued the Colombian government to stop deforestation in the Amazon that was contributing to climate change. They argued that this deforestation violated their rights to a healthy environment, life, health, food, and water. The case made it to Colombia’s Supreme Court, which issued a ground-​ breaking ruling. Commenting that environmental degradation–​not just in the Amazon but worldwide—​is so significant that it threatens “human existence,” the court declared the Colombian Amazon a “subject of rights” and ordered the government to develop an action plan to reduce deforestation to zero, with measurable strategies, and to restore the forest (Supreme Court of Colombia 2018). Similar rulings were made by Colombia’s Constitutional Court (2016), Ecuadorian courts (e.g., Sucumbios Provincial Court of Justice

512   Craig M. Kauffman

Rights of Nature Human Society

Economic Rights

Figure 26.2  Hierarchy of rights. Source: Adapted from Mumta Ito 2020, p. 325.

2018), and the Inter-​American Court of Human Rights (2017, pp. 28—​29), which recognized that protecting RoN is important not only for protecting the Earth’s biodiversity, but also for protecting the human right to a healthy environment. The Cofán case described in the chapter’s introduction is but one example of how Indigenous groups have begun to link RoN and Indigenous rights in lawsuits, which has facilitated the evolution of jurisprudence that sees RoN, environmental rights, and socio-​ cultural rights as intertwined to form a set of “bio-​cultural rights” (Kauffman and Martin 2019, 2021). Biocultural rights arguments have been used to support RoN by several courts in Ecuador and Colombia, as well as by tribal nations in the United States (Kauffman and Martin 2021). The relationship between RoN and economic rights is perhaps the most contentious issue and lays bare the difference between the conventional sustainable development paradigm and Earth jurisprudence paradigm. To date, this has only been addressed by Ecuadorian courts, which have ruled that RoN take precedence over economic rights like property rights and that procedural compliance with environmental impact assessments and environmental licenses are not necessarily sufficient to avoid RoN violations (Kauffman and Martin 2021). Ecuador’s Constitutional Court has a number of cases pending at the time of writing in which it plans to set binding jurisprudence on these matters. By contrast, Bolivia subsumes RoN under economic rights (Kauffman and Martin 2021). The argument that ecosystems should not be conceptualized as property has led some people to question whether RoN is compatible with the existence of markets and property rights. I argue that the failure to address this question poses an important obstacle to the system transformation RoN advocates are seeking. Confusion over this issue makes it hard for people who might be sympathetic to RoN to envision what an economic system based on Earth jurisprudence would look like. For this reason, I conclude with some thoughts on why I believe RoN does not mean an end to markets or property rights, as some critics fear.

Rights of Nature    513

Are Markets and Property Rights Compatible with RoN? Figure 26.2 suggests that implementing RoN does not mean an end to economic rights like property rights or markets to exchange commodities. It just means that economic rights are bound by higher order social rights and RoN. Not everything in Nature would be privatized and commodified, and people would no longer have the right to destroy ecosystems. But property rights and market exchange would continue. The main difference is that the subjects of market transactions and their relationships would change. People would still take from Nature things they need to live (e.g., air, water, food, energy, medicine, building materials, etc.). However, Earth jurisprudence sees this as one part of a reciprocal transaction between humans and ecosystems as equal legal subjects. Since Nature provides the conditions for life, the reciprocal relationship that comes with RoN means that people have obligations to Nature as part of this transaction. They must restore any damage done to the ecosystem as part of the market transaction (ecosystems don’t accept cash payment). And people cannot exploit the ecosystem to the point that it is permanently damaged or altered. The fact that existing RoN laws, like New Zealand’s Te Awa Tupua Act, recognize ecosystems as being able to possess property shows that RoN does not make property obsolete. While it may sound odd to think of rivers (understood as watershed ecosystems) holding water rights and selling water as property, this is conceptually no different than people selling their blood to blood banks. Legally, people are individuals. But people’s bodies are actually a collection of 11 interdependent systems (e.g., skeletal, muscular, nervous, etc.). People are more than the sum of their parts; all the body’s systems must be functioning together for a person to live. In this sense people are very much like ecosystems. A blood bank may withdraw a limited amount of blood from a person’s system and buy it to use as they wish. In this instance, the blood is treated as property that is bought and sold (much like a river’s water might be). The blood (water) is not the legal person; the human being (river ecosystem) is. The human being is more than just his or her blood, just as a river ecosystem is more than just its water. Because people are legal persons with rights, there is a limit to how much of a person’s blood a blood bank can withdraw. It cannot withdraw so much that the person’s systems stop functioning, causing death. If this happened, representatives of the blood bank would likely be charged with murder. Moreover, blood banks will typically give donors a glass of orange juice or something else rich in folic acid to replenish fluids and create new red blood cells in the body. There is a recognition of the obligation to help restore the person’s systems after inflicting some harm. The same logic applies in the case of ecosystems like rivers. RoN does not mean that humans cannot still benefit from ecosystems, including by impacting them in ways that inflict limited harm. It means that humans have the obligation to restore the health of the ecosystem, and people would be legally prohibited from inflicting such harm that it prevents the ecosystem from functioning and regenerating. In sum, there is plenty of space for economic activity and markets within a RoN framework. But it would look more like a circular economy (Schroeder et al. 2018) rooted in

514   Craig M. Kauffman zero-​growth economics (Farley 2012) than today’s economy based on infinite exponential growth in consumption and production.

Conclusion The politics of RoN is fundamentally about normative change. To be sure, RoN remains a weak counter-​norm, and it is unclear whether it will ever be fully adopted. Enforcement of RoN laws is imperfect, at times overwhelmed by larger anthropocentric systems. But since the goal of RoN laws is to facilitate system transformation through normative change, universal enforcement in the short term is probably not the best metric for measuring success, particularly at this early stage in RoN’s norm cycle. Human rights norms have existed for a century, but violations remain frequent. System transformation is a long, complex process, and RoN laws are merely one tool. Nevertheless, support for RoN has grown tremendously over the past decade and produced some results that were considered unthinkable only a few years ago—​from the banning of mining and oil concessions in Ecuador to New Zealand’s removal of Te Urewera from the registry of national parks. This chapter summarized how thousands of different kinds of actors have organized in global networks to advance RoN in different policy arenas through distinct pathways. The dramatic increase in the number of RoN laws adopted around the world, as well as courts’ willingness to recognize RoN as necessary for protecting human rights, provides tentative evidence that the RoN paradigm is gaining support. With the increase in cases, one emerging lesson is that RoN laws can only have the intended transformative effect to the extent that they embed Earth jurisprudence principles into legal and governance systems. I argue this is generally most effective when Nature is recognized as having rights and responsibilities distinct from those of humans. Structuring RoN laws in terms of legal personhood risks reproducing the anthropocentric paradigm that RoN advocates say is responsible for current environmental crises. However, this risk is lessened when legal personhood for Nature is combined with other provisions recognizing Earth jurisprudence, expressed, for example, through Indigenous values and practices, and used as a tool for removing anthropocentric systems to make room for new governance systems rooted in Earth jurisprudence.

Notes 1. All data on the number of RoN legal provisions throughout this paper come from an original dataset compiled by Craig Kauffman and Pamela Martin with the help of Alex Putzer and several research assistants, funded by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund. 2. Those regarding RoN are available at http://​www.harm​onyw​ithN​atur​eun.org/​unD​ocs/​ 3. https://​win​ewat​erwa​tch.org/​2020/​07/​movem​ent-​rig​hts-​join-​us-​live-​ind​igen​ous-​rig​hts-​ cosmol​ogy-​and-​rig​hts-​of-​Nat​ure/​ 4. See Kauffman and Martin (2021) for the formation of RoN networks and a network analysis.

Rights of Nature    515 5. Ambassador John Wood, chief Crown negotiator for the Te Awa Tupua and Te Urewera treaty settlements, interview with the author, Wellington, New Zealand, August 10, 2016. 6. I am indebted to Kirsti Luke and Tamati Kruger, both of the Tuhoe Iwi in Te Urewera, New Zealand, for this insight. 7. Kirsti Luke, CEO of Te Uru Taumatua, interview by author, Whakatane, New Zealand, June 1, 2019. 8. Leader of Te Uru Taumatua operations team in Waikaremoana, interview by author, Waikaremoana, New Zealand, May 30, 2019.

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516   Craig M. Kauffman Ito, Mumta. “Nature’s Rights: Why the European Union Needs a Paradigm Shift in Law to Achieve Its 2050 Vision.” In Sustainability and the Rights of Nature in Practice, edited by Cameron La Follete and Chris Maser, 311–​30. Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press, 2020. IUCN. “IUCN Programme 2017–​2020.” IUCN World Conservation Congress. Honolulu, Hawaii. September 2016. https://​www.iucn.org/​sites/​dev/​files/​iucn​_​pro​gram​me_​2​017-​ 2020-​fin​al_​a​ppro​ved.pdf Kauffman, Craig M. “Managing People for the Benefit of the Land: Practicing Earth Jurisprudence in Te Urewera, New Zealand.” ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 27, no. 3 (2020a): 578–​595. Kauffman, Craig M. 2020b. “Mapping Transnational Rights of Nature Networks & Laws: New Global Governance Structures for More Sustainable Development.” Presented at the International Studies Association Annual Conference, Toronto, March 29, 2020b. http://​ files.harm​onyw​ithN​atur​eun.org/​uplo​ads/​upload​924.pdf Kauffman, Craig M., and Pamela Martin. “Constructing Rights of Nature Norms in the US, Ecuador, and New Zealand.” Global Environmental Politics 18, no. 4 (2018): 43–​62. Kauffman, Craig M., and Pamela Martin. “How Courts Are Developing River Rights Jurisprudence: Comparing Guardianship in New Zealand, Colombia, and India.” Vermont Journal of Environmental Law 20, no. 3 (2019): 260–​289. Kauffman, Craig M., and Pamela Martin. The Politics of Rights of Nature: Strategies for Building a More Sustainable Future. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2021. Luke, Kirsti. Presentation at the United Nations Interactive Dialogue of the General Assembly on Harmony with Nature. United Nations Headquarters, New York, April 23, 2018. Margil, Mari. “On the Rights of Nature.” Intercontinental Cry. February 18, 2017. https://​inte​ rcon​tine​ntal​cry.org/​on-​the-​rig​hts-​of-​nat​ure/​ Margil, Mari. “Legal Rights of the Natural World: Beyond Personhood.” Common Dreams. September 26, 2019. www.commo​ndre​ams.org/​views/​2019/​09/​26/​legal-​rig​hts-​natu​ral-​ world-​bey​ond-​per​sonh​ood McKibben, Bill. “Winning Slowly Is the Same as Losing.” Rolling Stone. December 1, 2017. www.rolli​ngst​one.com/​polit​ics/​polit​ics-​news/​bill-​mckib​ben-​winn​ing-​slo​wly-​is-​the-​same-​ as-​los​ing-​198​205/​ Mucina, Ladislav. “Biome: Evolution of a Crucial Ecological and Biogeographical Concept.” New Phytologist 222, no. 1 (2019): 97–​114. O’Donnell, Erin. Legal Rights for Rivers: Competition, Collaboration and Water Governance. New York: Routledge, 2019. Pacari, Nina. “Naturaleza y territorio desde la mirada de los pueblos indigenas.” In Derechos de la naturaleza: El futuro es ahora, edited by Alberto Acosta and Esperanza Martinez. Quito: Abya-​Yala, 2009. Pope Francis (Jorge Mario Bergoglio). Address to the United Nations. New York. September 25, 2015. https://​time.com/​4049​905/​pope-​fran​cis-​us-​visit-​uni​ted-​nati​ons-​spe​ech-​tra​nscr​ipt/​ Salim v. State of Uttarakhand. Judgement for Writ Petition (PIL) No.126 of 2014. High Court of Uttarakhand at Nainital, India. March 20, 2017. Schroeder, Patrick, Kartika Anggraeni, and Uwe Weber. “The Relevance of Circular Economy Practices to the Sustainable Development Goals.” Journal of Industrial Ecology 23, no. 1 (2018): 77–​95. State of Uttarakhand v. Salim. Special leave petition submitted to the Supreme Court of India Civil Appellate Jurisdiction against the judgement and final order dated March 20, 2017, in Writ Petition No. 126 of 2014, passed by the Honorable High Court of Uttarakhand at Naintal.

Rights of Nature    517 Stone, Christopher. Should Trees Have Standing?: Toward Legal Rights for Natural Objects. Los Angeles: University of Southern California Press, 1972. Sucumbios Provincial Court of Justice [Ecuador]. Judgement No. 21333-​ 2018-​ 00266. November 16, 2018. Lago Agrio, Ecuador. Supreme Court of Colombia. Sentence STC4360-​2018/​2018-​00319 of April 5, 2018. BogotNew Roman" MERGEFORMAT á, Colombia. http://​legal.legis.com.co/​ Te Urewera Board. Te Kawa o Te Urewera. Taneatua, New Zealand: Te Urewera Board, 2017. https://​www.ngaitu​hoe.iwi.nz/​te-​kawa-​o-​te-​urew​era Thiel, Pella, and Henrik Hallgren. “Rights of Nature as a Prerequisite for Sustainability.” In Strongly Sustainable Societies, edited by Karl Bonnedahl and Pasi Heikkurinen, 61–​76. New York: Routledge, 2018. United Nations. Transforming Our World: The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. A/​RES/​70/​1, September 25. New York: UN, 2015.

Chapter 27

Im plem e nt i ng E nvironm en ta l Ri g h ts Reviewing the Evidence from Research and Practice

Joshua C. Gellers and Chris Jeffords Introduction Comparative environmental politics (CEP) involves the study and comparison of domestic politics and institutions related to the environment across national contexts (Steinberg and VanDeveer 2012, p. 5). One of the central inquiries pertinent to the field examines the extent to which environmental policies achieve their intended goals, and under what conditions (Harrington et al. 2004). Since its inception, scholarship on CEP has sought to explain state-​level variation in environmental outcomes by analyzing the effects of political systems, institutions, public opinion, and transnational factors (Cao et al. 2014). Curiously, political scientists have expended less effort assessing the efficacy of national environmental laws in general and constitutional environmental provisions in particular. Legal scholars, perhaps unsurprisingly, have devoted substantial energy to this task for decades (i.e., Tarlock and Tarak 1983), with important contributions made by political economists using formal models (i.e., Downing 1981). More recently, empirical analyses of environmental law have been undertaken by lawyers trained in social science methods (i.e., Boyd 2012). Given the emphasis CEP places on national institutions, it stands to reason that constitutionally embedded environmental protections, especially rights, offer a domain of environmental politics worthy of comparative analysis. “Environmental rights” is an umbrella term referring to entitlements humans or natural entities have to enjoy a certain level of environmental quality (i.e., right to the environment [R2E]), engage in democratic processes pertaining to environmental issues (i.e., procedural environmental rights [PERs]), or flourish under natural conditions (i.e., the rights of nature [RoN]) (Shelton 1991). The R2E falls within what are known as third-​generation (or solidarity) rights because its fulfillment mandates cooperation among actors both within and beyond the home jurisdiction (Downs 1993). PERs might be viewed as an extension

Implementing Environmental Rights    519 of first-​generation civil and political rights given their focus on “access to information, participation in decision making, and access to justice” where environmental matters are concerned (Daly 2012, p. 72; also see Marion Suiseeya, this volume). Finally, the RoN to freely exist in its given state represents something of an amalgamation of rights because it emphasizes freedom and life (i.e., first-​generation), health (i.e., second-​generation), and the “synergistic behavior among all actors to be effective” (i.e., third-​generation) (Gravelle 1997, p. 636). Environmental rights are classified as positive rights because they require actors to create the conditions necessary for their enjoyment; negative rights compel actors to abstain from behaviors that might threaten the liberties of others. The trend toward legal instantiation of environmental rights began at the international level with the 1972 Stockholm Declaration (Borràs 2016, p. 116). This watershed moment led to the diffusion of environmental rights among nation-​states starting in 1974, with the enactment of Yugoslavia’s constitution, which was the world’s first to include a positive R2E (Gellers 2017, p. 16). The 1980s saw the adoption of the R2E in two regional conventions, the African Charter (1982) and the Protocol of San Salvador (Additional Protocol 1989). More recently, regional pacts such as the Aarhus Convention (1998) and Escazú Agreement (Regional Agreement 2018) have advanced PERs, while the Arab Charter (2005) and Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) Human Rights Declaration (2012) introduced the R2E to the Middle East and Southeast Asia, respectively. While early environmental rights emerged from Europe, their rapid expansion throughout the developing world has demonstrated a kind of progressive norm leadership often thought to be the sole province of the Global North. The global dynamic through which environmental rights have found concrete expression at multiple levels of governance has come to be known as “environmental constitutionalism” (Kotzé 2015, p. 187). While the R2E and PERs are predominantly found in national constitutions, they also appear in regional treaties, domestic law, and international and domestic jurisprudence. As such, much of the research in this area concentrates on provisions articulated in the form of substantive rights found within state charters, legislative acts, and court decisions around the world. However, some have argued that constitutional elements worded as directive principles or state duties deserve perhaps at least as much attention because they are defined and enacted by democratically elected legislative or executive branches, as opposed to the judiciary (Weis 2018). The R2E is often inscribed as the right to a clean, favorable, healthy, safe, sustainable, or otherwise thriving environment. For instance, the Kenyan Constitution (2010) affords its citizens “the right to a clean and healthy environment,” while Costa Rica’s (1949) national charter guarantees “the right to a healthy and ecologically balanced environment.” A recent survey found 110 states with such rights in their national constitutions, 126 countries that have ratified a regional treaty containing an R2E, and 101 states that have incorporated similarly phrased entitlements into their respective domestic legislation (UN General Assembly 2019). The same report found PERs of one kind of another in more than 20 countries. Crucially, environmental rights simply did not exist prior to the 1970s, but, over a span of 50 years, they have expanded to every region of the world, finding homes in both the Global North and South, across different legal systems, and where adherence to the rule of law varies widely. The booming literature on the RoN points to several factors that have enabled their emergence, including the ability to capitalize on key political moments and the support of epistemic communities (Akchurin 2015), the mobilization of Indigenous social movements

520    Joshua C. Gellers and Chris Jeffords (Youatt 2017), the acknowledgment of scientific realities highlighted by the Anthropocene (Knauß 2018), and context-​specific sensitivities of activist judges (Alley 2019). These rights, whose origins lie in a timely combination of Western ideas and Indigenous cosmologies (Kauffman and Martin 2017), have found a home in domestic law, national and subnational constitutions, and domestic jurisprudence (see Kauffman chapter, this volume). The first governmental entity to adopt an ordinance on the RoN was the Tamaqua Borough of Pennsylvania in 2006 (Cano-​Pecharroman 2018, p. 4). Two years later, Ecuador became the first country in the world to give constitutional effect to the RoN. The country’s 2008 national charter devotes an entire chapter to the subject (Ecuador Const., tit. II, ch. 7). Soon after, Bolivia promulgated two RoN statutes, and then, in 2014, New Zealand passed legislation granting legal personhood to the Whanganui River (Calzadilla and Kotzé 2018, pp. 398–​399). Over the past decade courts have also participated in the RoN movement, with jurists in Ecuador, Colombia, and India granting rights to non-​human natural entities (Kauffman and Martin 2019). At present, RoN legal provisions of one kind or another exist in at least eight countries (Kauffman and Martin 2018). Despite cognizable variation in the way that RoN laws, constitutional provisions, and legal judgments are articulated, all of them share in common a desire to combat ecological destruction by applying concepts from non-​Western worldviews to Western legal and political systems. Interestingly, while the RoN have obtained formal recognition more recently than the R2E and PERs, the ideas underlying the former legal innovation have roots that reach back to antiquity (Boyd 2017, p. xxix). But, in addition to variation in their intellectual age, the three types of environmental rights covered here reflect different degrees of compatibility with current legal paradigms. Both the R2E and PERs fit comfortably with Western liberal notions of individual rights despite their characterization as third-​ generation rights requiring collective action. The RoN, on the other hand, represent a holistic, non-​ anthropocentric divergence from the traditional view of rights in Western modernity. Yet their entrenchment in Western legal and political systems over the past decade suggests that working from within the dominant paradigm might be viewed as a better strategy than attempting to overcome or ignore it. But do environmental rights make a difference? Despite having been around for nearly half a century, researchers and practitioners are just beginning to understand the conditions under which such rights produce meaningful outcomes. As mentioned earlier, while economists and legal scholars have long made concerted efforts to analyze the effectiveness of environmental law on a comparative basis, the same cannot be said for students of CEP. The absence of such work among political scientists is surprising because environmental law in general and environmental rights in particular explicitly draw on major themes of CEP, including the importance of political context, the role of the state, and the complexity underlying variation in environmental outcomes. Seeking to overcome this gap in the literature, this chapter represents the first effort to take stock of extant knowledge about the implementation of human and non-​human rights pertaining to the natural environment as seen through a comparative lens. In particular, we review existing literature on the effects of environmental rights and highlight the conceptual and practical issues associated with evaluating their efficacy in order to better understand the extent to which national differences in political systems, institutions, and actors affect their performance. The chapter closes by outlining environmental, legal, political, and social outcomes worthy of further study.

Implementing Environmental Rights    521

Rights Theory and the Environment Before entering into a discussion about the effectiveness of certain types of rights (especially those of non-​humans), it is helpful to first revisit what rights are intended to do and to whom they might apply. Over a century ago, Hohfeld (1913) developed a now-​famous typology that captures the range of legal relations found among humans. On the one hand, there are four pairs of opposites indicating the presence and corresponding absence of a particular legal incident: rights/​no-​rights, privileges/​duties, powers/​disabilities, and immunities/​liabilities. On the other hand, there are four pairs of correlatives indicating how one’s possession of a benefit implies a reciprocal obligation held by another: rights (or claims)/​duties, privileges/​ no-​rights, powers/​liabilities, and immunities/​disabilities. Most environmental rights are phrased in terms of a claim made against the state, which entails a government’s correlative duty to see that the right is fulfilled. Both the R2E and PERs are relatively noncontroversial in a Hohfeldian framework. However, the RoN proves problematic for two reasons. First, Hohfeld (1917, p. 721) stipulated that legal relations could only occur among humans. As such, non-​human entities like nature are considered incapable of engaging in legal incidents. Second, nature lacks the ability to make claims against those who must perform duties. But these issues do not prohibit nature’s inclusion in Hohfeld’s scheme. Today, courts and legislatures around the world, in national contexts as vastly different as Ecuador, India, and New Zealand, have begun recognizing the rights of non-​human entities, especially nature or natural features like ecosystems, glaciers, and rivers (Knauß 2018). In addition, there are legal strategies for acting on behalf of “voiceless” natural and future entities (Abate 2020, xii), such as the doctrine of parens patriae in the United States (see, e.g., Rendleman 1971) and representative standing deployed in India (see, e.g., Dias 1994, p. 248). Just as there are humans charged with advocating for others incapable of representing their own interests in legal fora, so, too, can surrogates speak on behalf of nature. In general, there are two main schools of thought regarding the purpose and referents of legal rights. In will (or choice) theory, rights allow for the expression of individual autonomy (Dodsworth et al. 2018, p. 3). Those capable of possessing rights can choose whether or not to impose correlative duties on others (Marx and Tiefensee 2015, p. 72). The affirmative declaration of entitlements and articulation of duties lend rights an air of legitimacy. Of course, not everyone is intelligent or rational enough to make such decisions on his or her own behalf. Will theory thus presumes that a legal subject possesses the requisite level of cognitive functioning necessary to make rational choices (Kurki 2017, p. 79). Alternatively, interest (or benefit) theory advances the position that rights protect a person’s core interests. These interests need to be important enough to warrant imposing duties on others (Dodsworth et al. 2018, p. 3). For present purposes, interests can be arrayed along anthropocentric (i.e., human-​centered) and non-​anthropocentric (i.e., not human-​centered) lines. Under this approach, rights may be extended where legal subjects (i.e., human or non-​human) are seen as capable of having interests, and those interests are deemed significant enough to merit protection. Paradoxically, these determinations are made exclusively by humans. Under will theory, individual autonomy, not collective experiences and benefits, forms the basis for rights. An interpretation of environmental rights more amenable to will theory

522    Joshua C. Gellers and Chris Jeffords might be that humans possess entitlements that they can elect to have realized or not through the imposition of state duties (Lewis 2012, pp. 66–​68). Yet this reduces rights to the expression of individual will, which renders the RoN practically impossible. In addition, the ability of individuals to waive their environmental rights could result in violating the rights of others due to the fact that no person lives in an environment completely isolated from that of their human kin. The overarching category of environmental rights is more readily justified under interest theory, although the particular interests identified vary depending on the kind of legal subject under examination (i.e., human or non-​human) and the focus of the interests (i.e., anthropocentric or non-​anthropocentric). For instance, a human may have an interest in breathing clean air, which requires that the state protect air quality and combat pollution. Here, the legal subject is a human and the interest is anthropocentric, even if spillover effects from implementing the right may benefit flora and fauna as well. As another example, an ecosystem might be said to have an interest in thriving and self-​regulating, which would necessarily involve preventing the incursion of development activities that disrupt the environment from obtaining a state of natural equilibrium. Here, the ecosystem is the legal subject and the interests are non-​anthropocentric, although safeguarding its right could positively impact humans and other animals that reside within it. While the subject of the right and the kind of interests central to it may vary, environmental rights are more readily supported by interest theory than will theory. While Hohfeld (1913) laid the foundation for modern human rights theory and the relationship between rights and reciprocal duties, he did not explain where human rights come from. Toward this end, Dembour (2010) notes that there are at least four sources of human rights: (1) natural, (2) deliberative, (3) protest, and (4) discourse. Within the natural school, rights are entitlements endowed upon humans by virtue of their humanity, and they are universal in nature, regardless of the extent to which society recognizes said rights. The deliberative school, however, envisions human rights as “political values that liberal societies choose to adopt” and are not naturally bestowed upon humans “just because” (Dembour 2010, p. 3). To address societal injustices and inequalities, the protest school describes rights as “claims and aspirations that allow the status quo to be contested in favor of the oppressed” (Dembour 2010, p. 3). The discourse school argues that “human rights only exist because people talk about them,” but that individuals, groups, and states, for example, are better able to express political claims because of this discourse (Dembour 2010, p. 4). While not an exhaustive list of the characteristics of each school of thought (and perhaps an oversimplification of each), it is possible that the R2E is fundamentally based in the natural school of thought and supported by the other schools. By virtue of our physiology, we humans require a clean and healthy environment and environmental amenities of a certain quantity and quality. The extent to which these requirements are taken as rights or converted into rights depends on the social, political, and economic contexts in which the requirements are embedded. That is, the R2E can be respected, protected, and fulfilled (or not) through various avenues, and it remains important that said rights are not only taken as given but, for meaningful outcomes, there must also be some temporal and spatial deliberation, protest, and discourse. PERs, on the other hand, seem most supported by the deliberative school since they reflect a normative commitment to democratic values. At the same time, PERs might also be founded on protest because they are intended to provide a level playing field in environmental decision-​making to avoid causing environmental

Implementing Environmental Rights    523 injustices. Perhaps ironically, the RoN are arguably least associated with the natural school because human rights are fundamentally anthropocentric and humanity does not extend to the natural world. After all, “[n]‌ature is amoral” and rights are only granted to non-​humans through human intervention, rendering them artifactual, not natural (Rolston III 1988, p. 48). Instead, extant literature suggests that the RoN are more likely premised on protest and discourse since they arose partly in response to environmental degradation caused by development and through the elevation and recognition of Indigenous cosmologies. Of course, the very processes of defining human rights and identifying their antecedents have been marked by exclusion and laden with power differentials from the start. Architects of the dominant human rights discourse, mainly elites from Western states, viewed the world in terms of civilized saviors stipulating appropriate state behavior and unruly savages whose only path to redemption lay in the adoption of human rights norms (Mutua 2001). Even decades after their official coronation, human rights have achieved gains in the human condition that remain highly unequal. Part of the reason for this is that human rights advocacy in places like Africa is disconnected from those it intends to serve because organizations are designed in ways that reflect Western, not local, imperatives (Odinkalu 1999). Despite the dramatic proliferation of constitutions promising increasing numbers of rights, violence continues to haunt postcolonial societies (Comaroff and Comaroff 2006). In the environmental arena, the expansion of environmental rights has been met with a troubling increase in the number of environmental defenders (many of whom represent Indigenous communities) murdered because of their activism (Global Witness 2018). In short, the origins and impacts of human rights remain deeply problematic and continue to neglect the significant role that power asymmetries play in their enactment. While philosophical debates rage on, the politics of human rights is less focused on where rights came from and more interested in understanding the extent to which they are meeting their lofty aspirations. Yet the ideational discussion cannot be simply divorced from analyses of practical outcomes. With respect to environmental rights, the R2E and PERs represent extensions of anthropocentric, individual human rights comfortably at home in Western thinking, while the RoN grew out of an ecocentric, holistic perspective on rights influenced by Indigenous cosmologies. Fortunately for present purposes, the incorporation of the R2E, PERs, and the RoN into existing institutions permits empirical investigation into their effectiveness.

Implementing Environmental Rights and Implications for CEP In this chapter, we are concerned with implementation, by which we mean the process through which constitutional provisions are put into practice. More specifically, we examine the extent to which environmental rights generate positive changes for people and the planet (i.e., their effectiveness). We use “implementation” interchangeably with “effectiveness” (see, e.g., Victor et al. 1998; Young 1999). In general, studies on the implementation of environmental rights fall into one of three categories: (1) legal analyses of one or several cases, (2) quantitative assessments of their utility across a large number of cases and/​or

524    Joshua C. Gellers and Chris Jeffords years, and (3) qualitative, social scientific evaluations of their effectiveness in a limited set of countries. The earliest efforts, almost exclusively the work of legal scholars, tend to fall into the first category, and they consist of research examining, inter alia, judgments that upheld the environmental rights of petitioners (Bruch et al. 2001), the extent to which environmental rights have been recognized through judicial decisions regarding fundamental human rights (Hassan and Azfar 2004), and whether or not environmental rights were deemed enforceable by courts (May 2005). Notably, these pioneering works of legal scholarship end their inquiries at the moment when all parties to a case have exited the courtroom. Later research on the RoN picks up where these initial reports left off, articulating guidelines for their successful implementation (Bittermann 2017); lamenting the failure of such rights to curtail environmentally damaging development, as in Bolivia’s 2014 Law on Mining and Metallurgy (Calzadilla and Kotzé 2018); and celebrating decisions that recognize the rights of natural entities like Colombia’s Atrato River Basin (Kauffman and Martin 2019). A recent collection of essays offers a fresh update by laying out conceptual issues pertinent to the implementation of environmental rights and chronicling developments from across the world where realizing the R2E has proven elusive (Daly and May 2018), as in Nigeria and in the United States, where, in some states like Pennsylvania and Montana, a unique state-​level constitutional R2E provision is at odds with the lack of such a provision in the national constitution. Yet, none of these contributions offers a systematic analysis of the extent to which environmental rights produce discernible results related to human or environmental protection. The subsequent wave of research on this topic, authored by lawyers, economists, and political scientists, utilizes quantitative methods to determine the relationship between environmental rights and political, legal, environmental, or social outcomes. In an extensive survey and analysis, Boyd (2012) observes that the adoption of R2E provisions has led to stronger environmental laws, closing gaps in environmental regulation, an increase in environmental litigation, and the prevention of backsliding on environmental commitments. Anecdotal evidence suggests attendant effects on environmental justice, public involvement in environmental decision-​making, and government accountability. Applying basic statistical techniques to a range of environmental indicators, Boyd finds that states with an R2E experience higher levels of environmental performance (i.e., lower ecological footprints) than those without. Jeffords and Minkler (2016) provide the first known attempt at a causal analysis linking R2E provisions to environmental outcomes. After making the case for statistical causality, the authors find that countries with an R2E provision have relatively higher scores on Yale’s Environmental Performance Index (EPI) (Emerson et al. 2012) and some of its component indices, such as Environmental Health (EH) and Ecosystem Vitality (EV). Using the legal strength index created by Jeffords (2013), the results show that having a strongly worded provision, or one with more categories of language most closely associated with enforceable law versus directive principles (Minkler 2009), is also associated with incrementally higher EPI scores. The EPI ranges from 0 to 100, with a higher score indicating that the underlying country is implementing and enforcing policies and procedures directed at improving environmental outcomes. Using 2014 data, for example, Jeffords and Minkler show an average increase of approximately 5.5 points in EPI for those countries which have an R2E provision compared to those which do not. The average EPI score for the 91 countries included in the data is approximately 53.3, which implies that having an R2E provision

Implementing Environmental Rights    525 increases this value to approximately 58.8. Similar results persist for EPI in 2012 and for EV in 2012 and 2014. Using data from 2002–​2014 within a repeated cross-​section regression framework, Jeffords and Gellers (2018) demonstrate a consistently positive and statistically significant correlation between EPI and possession of an R2E provision. This relationship is strengthened in the presence of higher levels of economic wealth and perceived adherence to the rule of law, suggesting that state capacity matters to the implementation of environmental rights. Within a lagged cross-​section framework for 198 countries from 2009–​2010, Gellers and Jeffords (2018) correlate PERs and environmental justice, while controlling for the existence or not of R2E. Their measures of environmental justice include access to improved water sources, access to improved sanitation facilities, and per capita carbon dioxide emissions. The findings suggest a positive correlation between PERs to information about the natural environment and environmental justice outcomes, specifically the access variables. This association can also be a bit stronger for those countries whose constitution also features an R2E provision. As of 2010, this was a short list of 13 countries including Argentina, Belarus, Ukraine, and Norway. Continuing with cross-​sectional analyses, Gellers and Jeffords (2019) conduct a descriptive statistical analysis with a focus on the Asia-​Pacific region. Analyzing the percent change from 2014 to 2018 in EPI, EV, and EH across the 58 countries in the region, the authors find notable improvements in EPI and EV and reductions in EH, all for those countries that have R2E provisions, PERs, and statements of public policy related to the natural environment. While not a causal analysis, the results indicate a positive correlation between having any one of these constitutional provisions and the state of the natural environment as measured by EPI or EV. One issue with the analyses of Jeffords and Minkler (2016), Jeffords and Gellers (2018), and Gellers and Jeffords (2018, 2019), however, is that each utilizes a cross-​section framework, and the results are not generalizable across time or space. Despite this, teasing out the temporal effects of constitutional environmental human rights provisions on environmental outcomes presents its own set of issues. To analyze what, if any, temporal effects exist, Jeffords (2016) uses a country-​level panel data framework to estimate the correlation between R2E and access to improved sanitation facilities and improved drinking water sources. Jeffords’s analysis covers the 22-​year period from 1990 to 2012, where many variables—​not just the interpretation and use of an R2E provision—​experienced changes in magnitude, measurement, and scope. Although Jeffords finds a positive and statistically significant association between aging R2E provisions and access to improved water sources, the results are highly sensitive to the chosen temporal specification. The most recent generation of environmental rights scholarship, mainly conducted by lawyers and political scientists, trades large-​N analyses for small-​N case studies that employ qualitative methods. While quantitative methods allow for large-​scale comparisons among states that assess the relationship among key variables, qualitative methods permit closer investigation of fewer cases in a manner more amenable to teasing out causal mechanisms at work. In interviews with lawyers from Germany, Latvia, and the United Kingdom who represented stakeholders in environmental cases, Fernhout et al. (2014, p. 89) determine that definitional ambiguity surrounding the term “environmental matters” and variation in domestic legal contexts (i.e., different standing rules) frustrate effective, consistent implementation of the Aarhus Convention. To rectify these issues, the authors suggest drawing up a

526    Joshua C. Gellers and Chris Jeffords new legislative directive that incorporates relevant case law and liberalizes the requirements for recognizing environmental nongovernmental organizations seeking access to justice. Christel and Gutiérrez (2017) perform a within-​case study regarding the enforcement of the R2E in Argentina. They conclude that implementation of environmental rights depends on a combination of contentious (i.e., social protest, judicial litigation, and expert controversy) and institutionalized (i.e., formation of permanent forms of political organization) modes of participation. Kauffman and Martin (2017) conduct a comparative analysis of 13 cases to explain why some RoN lawsuits succeed while others fail. Utilizing primary documents, interviews, and process tracing, the authors identify four pathways through which the RoN are being implemented in Ecuador: “(1) civil society pressure, (2) instrumental government action, (3) bureaucratic institutionalization, and (4) application by the juridical epistemic community (i.e., judges)” (Kauffman and Martin 2017, p. 134). The studies mentioned here exemplify the kind of granular causal analysis needed to supplement the largely correlational findings of the quantitative work described earlier. A less scientific but no less useful approach to understanding the conditions under which environmental rights might achieve concrete outcomes can be found in the globally crowdsourced compilations of good practices organized by the UN Special Rapporteur (formerly Independent Expert) on human rights and the environment (UN General Assembly 2015, 2019). Although space constraints prohibit a full accounting of practices mentioned in the two reports, a few examples prove illustrative. In terms of the R2E, Indonesia launched a program in 2007 that distributed free liquified petroleum gas starter packages to households. The program reduced kerosene use in households by 92%, helping to decrease air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions. In 2013, Singapore introduced subsidies to help vulnerable populations pay for medical treatment associated with air pollution–​related illnesses. This program has assisted nearly 100,000 patients. As for PERs, the Canadian province of Ontario has developed an online Environmental Registry (https://​ero.onta​rio.ca/​) that posts notices about environmental matters and allows citizens to comment on changes to or new environmental regulations. Uruguay’s National Water Policy Law provides mechanisms for public participation in environmental decision-​making, resulting in the promulgation of action plans designed to improve water quality in several river basins. The UN Special Rapporteur on human rights and the environment has thus far not examined efforts to implement the RoN. However, at the end of 2019, the UN General Assembly charged members of the Harmony with Nature Knowledge Network with studying the progress of RoN initiatives at all levels of governance (UN General Assembly 2020). It should be noted that the reports just described feature critical shortcomings that limit their ability to accurately capture the extent to which environmental rights have been successfully implemented, obstacles that are common to the study of comparative human rights more generally. First, it isn’t clear that the measures highlighted in the documents were enacted as a direct result of environmental rights laws or policies. Absent definitive evidence demonstrating such connections, at least some of the projects could just as easily have emerged without environmental rights inspiring their inception, a possibility that casts doubt on the practical necessity of such provisions. Second, similar to the first wave of research on environmental rights, the impact of legal institutions and programs is operationalized in terms of decisions rendered or plaintiffs bringing suit, not empirically traceable environmental and human benefits. This deficiency renders these examples vulnerable to the familiar criticism that knowledge about the impact of environmental rights

Implementing Environmental Rights    527 outside the courtroom remains woefully incomplete. Third, many of the good practices refer to legal, political, or regulatory initiatives that have yet to bear fruit. More concretely, some of the efforts described have not been implemented or assessed, so the extent to which they provide models that might be exported elsewhere remains dubious. As such, they represent good intentions, not necessarily good practices worthy of replication. To be sure, the three bodies of scholarship on the implementation of environmental rights continue to grow as more countries adopt such provisions and more time passes since their enactment. Legal scholars have notably led the charge here, recording key developments in this domain at the subnational (i.e., May 2017), national (i.e., Alvarado and Rivas-​Ramírez 2018; May and Daly 2019; Soyapi 2019), and regional (i.e., Krämer 2018) levels. Yet, as will be explored later, there are several impediments, which include implementation difficulties as they relate to the RoN and R2E and economic and natural resource constraints, standing in the way of obtaining greater clarity regarding the extent to which these laws and policies generate improvements in environmental quality, democratic practices, or natural flourishing.

Conceptual and Practical Challenges of Evaluating Environmental Rights As explained earlier, different kinds of environmental rights arguably emerge from different schools of thought and can languish or thrive within the institutional framework of country-​ specific and international constraints. However, these instruments draw on a shared normative foundation that promotes the legalization of concerns at the nexus of rights and the environment. But, to give these rights teeth, conceptual and practical barriers, such as those discussed in this section, must be overcome. The steps taken to provide humans with the R2E may, at times, be at odds with the RoN. Similarly, taking steps to protect nature might frustrate the enjoyment of other rights. At the same time, there may be ways in which respecting, protecting, and fulfilling any one or all of these rights is mutually beneficial to both humans and nature. This not only complicates the state’s ability to respect, protect, and fulfill said rights, but it implies at least two situations where the rights are at odds and two where they are not. They are at odds when protecting the RoN does not protect the rights of humans and when protecting the rights of humans does not protect the RoN. They are mutually beneficial when the protection of one transfers to the other. Carefully derived case law, policies, statutory law, and the like could potentially foresee some of these issues, but humans are far from omniscient and someone needs to speak for nature if it is to thrive when its interests conflict with those of humans. Relevant examples of conflicts between human and environmental imperatives can be seen in legal cases or legislation regarding the Atrato River Basin of Colombia, the Whanganui River in New Zealand, and coal mining and natural gas extraction in Pennsylvania. With respect to the first discord, it is easy to imagine a scenario where protecting the RoN leads to reductions in the welfare of humans. For example, protecting an ecosystem for the sake of its place in nature may reduce the availability of certain environmental resources required for human life. Consider a body of water used to also provide humans with drinking

528    Joshua C. Gellers and Chris Jeffords water. Overuse could deplete the resource, while pollution could spoil it. Protecting it for its position in nature and for the sake of the continuity of the spatial and temporal environment by way of reducing or disallowing its use as a drinking water source would force humans to obtain their water from elsewhere. One can look to the use of the freshwater aquifer in the Saurashtra Coast of Gujarat, India in the 1960s and 1970s, which was depleted from overuse and, as a result, suffered from severe saltwater intrusion (Shah et al. 2000). Stepping in to protect this water resource prior to this issue implies, among other things, a carefully implemented groundwater management plan and, perhaps, the sourcing of additional water to meet the needs of residents, businesses, and the like. What happened instead was the lack of protection and a full collapse of the local economy, ecology, and society. Those with the necessary resources were able to relocate and find work (or create work), while the resource-​constrained suffered through a stagnant local economy without a reliable source of water for their daily needs. Although the counterfactual does not exist, it is easy to argue that this coastal aquifer could have been managed in a different, perhaps more sustainable way. If this meant protecting the aquifer from all human use or from excessive human use, it may have triggered the need to find an additional source of water which itself could suffer from similar depletion issues. These are the very kinds of issues for which Ostrom (1990) provided many unique management solutions. At the same time, effective common-​pool resource management may require well-​defined property rights, similar interests and end goals of the users, and low transactions costs (Coase 1960). Unless it is something that the property owners want, a state or advocacy group may have trouble navigating or overcoming these three requirements when attempting to secure the RoN. With respect to the second discord, a right meant to protect the access humans have to the same body of water, either for drinking or agricultural purposes, could come at the expense of nature, as in the case Narmada Bachao Andolan vs. Union of India and Others (2000). According to claimants in the case, building dams along the Narmada River would lead to the displacement of many Indigenous tribes and farmers, for example, while also potentially causing environmental and ecological harm (although the court was seemingly skeptical of this likelihood). In the end, the court ruled in favor of the project while noting that water is a necessity and a human right derived from Article 21 of the Constitution of India. As such, water from the dam project would be moved by tanker to individuals who lived in parts of the Thar Desert. Gleick (1996) outlines the basic quantity and quality requirements of an average human as they relate to fulfilling the drinking, sanitation, bathing, and food preparation components of the human right to water. The total, at a minimum, is approximately 13 gallons per person per day, but this does not include the water required to grow and transport food or the water required to produce clothing for individuals. By contrast, the average person in the United States uses about 98 gallons of water per day (Kenny et al. 2009). Gleick’s estimate also excludes situations where individuals must spend hours of their day gathering and collecting water from a distant source, as common practice dictates in Madagascar (Boone et al. 2011). These hours devoted to the logistics of providing human nourishment detract from time that might otherwise be used for informal and formal education, and this burden often falls heavily on women and children (Boone et al. 2011). As Gleick aptly notes, if the right to clean water is defined only in terms of the water required for the purposes he outlines, it would exclude many other fundamental human requirements of water, and the quantities needed for these uses are not trivial; they amount to hundreds of gallons per

Implementing Environmental Rights    529 person per day. Defining the human right to clean water as 13 gallons per person per day versus a few hundred does not disappoint in terms of generating practical difficulties, as the water has to come from some source and nature may not be able to provide the resource at the required rate. Fulfilling this realistic estimate of water needs could negatively impact ecosystems and the services they provide, as well as force the increased use of desalination technologies, which also generate environmental issues such salt brine disposal and creating inland piping networks from the water source. Those respecting, protecting, and fulfilling the right must take into consideration the implications of the spatial and temporal issues associated with the size and needs of the community using said resource. Jeffords and Shah (2013) outline many of these concerns within a basic economic model of a nonrenewable resource (i.e., groundwater from a geologic aquifer) with a backstop technology (i.e., desalinated seawater) where individuals have a minimum consumption requirement over water. The primary issue with securing the R2E, especially as it relates to the right to clean water, is that a human must be directly provided with something tangible (i.e., water for drinking, sanitation, food preparation, etc.). Such provision is by no means free, and the existence of a backstop technology (Nordhaus 1973) implies a generally unlimited source of the required resource but at a high cost or price. An R2E meant to provide individuals with a minimum amount of water of at least drinking quality could yield faster depletion of the resource as the population grows and individual requirements accumulate in the face of growing industry demands. It is also possible that regulatory paralysis turns the policy providing the minimum requirement into maximum provision (Chapman 2007). With respect to the mutual benefits, consider the same resource. In the spirit of managing the commons, protecting human access to clean water could lead to a scenario where nature indirectly benefits from the careful planning of human use. In the state of Pennsylvania, for example, the recent use of an oft-​ignored constitutional environmental human right to clean water has led to improvements in local water quality and use. Although the provision itself has existed since 1971, it was not utilized until 2018, when the Pennsylvania Supreme Court found in favor of the Pennsylvania Environmental Defense Fund, stipulating that all oil and gas proceeds from leased lands must be used only for environmental protection and conservation. As such, through the use of an R2E provision, the natural environment will benefit from additional funds directed at protection and conservation and, as a result, may experience improvements in quality along multiple dimensions. Similarly, a carefully crafted RoN could realize the symbiotic relationship shared between humans and the many elements of nature. This may be the scenario playing out along the Atrato River Basin in Colombia, which was declared a legal person in 2016 by Colombia’s Constitutional Court (Kauffman and Martin 2019). This declaration occurred as a result of, among other factors, the residents of Choco, Colombia, filing lawsuits against the Colombian government that, it was claimed, had failed to take action against illegal mining and deforestation. The main point to recognize is that whether securing the R2E or RoN, neither are “free” and there are many opportunity costs associated with the resources devoted to either or both of these ends, not to mention the unintended consequences and potential for external costs (and perhaps benefits) not yet understood by the extant economic research paradigms. Simply protecting nature because of its implied and explicit value does not guarantee harm will be eliminated. Perversely, it could be redistributed instead. The comparisons Kauffman and Martin (2019) draw between how the RoN was enforced in the context of the Ganga and

530    Joshua C. Gellers and Chris Jeffords Yamuna Rivers in India and how it was enacted in the cases involving the Atrato River Basin in Colombia and the Whanganui River in New Zealand highlight this point about harm. The structure created to protect the Ganga and Yamuna Rivers in India lacks certain fundamental characteristics which give the RoN bite. Thus, it is possible for harm to persist despite the attainment of judicial recognition. Such protections also do not guarantee that humans will obtain external or spillover benefits. Surely a symbiotic right which does both—​provides an R2E and RoN—​is a possibility, but it has to be phrased carefully in a way that adheres to local norms. Respecting, protecting, and fulfilling the R2E implies human-​to-​human duties and state-​ to-​human duties. For the RoN, the duties are unidirectional: humans and the state have obligations to nature, but nature cannot and does not have obligations to humans. This has implications for nonenvironmental resources used to adjudicate disputes and whether individuals/​states will find it practical to take steps to protect human rights or the RoN. Using a set of supportive domestic and international institutions within a democratic state where there is widespread belief in the functioning of the legal system and resources available for any interested parties to file complaints, individuals can take each other to court or sue the government/​collective legal persons (i.e., corporations), or the government can bring cases against individuals or collective legal persons. If there is an issue with environmental protection, an individual can attempt to sue the government (on rights-​based grounds) to improve the situation. The ability to sue, however, is not a universal guarantee across time, space, and place. Those in democratic states with a strong belief in the rule of law may have an easier time taking these steps compared to those in more autocratic states where there is considerably less faith in the government’s ability to uphold the law. Nature, on the other hand, cannot bring suit against an individual or the state on its own accord, and yet this framework still requires protection of its rights. In this sense, and because nature cannot speak for itself, the protection of the RoN is similar to that of the rights of infants or the mentally incompetent: someone must be looking out for the best interests of nature. Unlike most infants, however, nature never gains independence and autonomy, and thus it must have a steward ready and willing to act on its behalf. For a right to have an impact, four elements must be satisfied: (1) people need to be aware of the right, (2) people need to seek to vindicate the right, (3) an institution needs to facilitate the protection of the right, and (4) the institution’s action needs to be implemented. Bluntly speaking, laws on the books remain useless if the parties intended to benefit from them do not or cannot introduce claims to have their grievances redressed. Practical challenges to the four elements listed act as confounding or intervening variables affecting the path from enactment to implementation. Such barriers may include, inter alia, low levels of popular consciousness regarding the existence of environmental rights, a lack of financial resources needed to hire an attorney, a dearth of lawyers who possess the time and training necessary to assist clients with environmental rights complaints, backlogs of legal cases that prevent timely adjudication of environmental disputes, and ineffective or corrupt government officials who complicate filing claims or fail to enact judicial orders. Properly executed PERs, which are easier to enforce than the R2E (Daly 2012, p. 77), can go a long way toward reducing the likelihood that these issues obstruct the pursuit of environmental justice. To be sure, the implementation of environmental rights in various contexts remains hampered by resource constraints that reflect unresolved societal inequities, along with national differences in culture, institutional quality, regime type, and state capacity. Such

Implementing Environmental Rights    531 hindrances speak to broader challenges that continue to frustrate the realization of rights in general across the world, such as inequality, racism, sexism, ethnonationalism, corruption, and genocide.

Filling the Implementation Gaps: A Renewed Research Agenda Considering the state of knowledge about the implementation of environmental rights and the conceptual and practical difficulties inherent in assessing their effectiveness, it stands to reason that a diverse array of indicators might be worth entertaining. More directly, while the literature has tended to focus on single measures of implementation (i.e., decisions in favor of claimants, improvements in environmental quality, etc.), in reality many different kinds of results are made possible by the promulgation of rights. Here, we suggest a few such indicators that speak to the larger set of environmental, legal, political, and social outcomes implicitly tied to environmental rights and briefly mention some of the empirical hurdles researchers may encounter when using them. First, the most direct outcomes associated with the R2E and RoN pertain to the quality of the environment. Relevant results capable of verification include reduction in point source and nonpoint source pollution, halting environmentally harmful development activities, restoration of natural equilibria observed prior to the onset of environmental degradation, and flourishing levels of biodiversity. The difficulties that analysts might face when attempting to assess these outcomes involve the determination of causal relationships, data availability, and enforcement of environmental standards or judicial orders. Second, legal outcomes represent perhaps the next most logical group of consequences. Although litigation rates have been used in empirical legal scholarship for decades (i.e., Blankenburg 1975), other measures, such as funding for public interest environmental litigation, the number of public interest environmental law firms, and the number of judges and lawyers trained in environmental rights jurisprudence, merit observation. Of course, intervening factors such as corruption, bureaucratic efficiency, a country’s development status, judicial independence, and limitations of a given legal system’s standing doctrine can all impact the adjudication of environmental rights disputes to a nontrivial degree. Third, PERs in particular may produce political (or perhaps democratic) outcomes. A few examples prove illustrative: new environmental information clearinghouses established, the number of public environmental records requests, participation levels in environmental decision-​making, and the magnitude of public comments on proposed and amended environmental policies. These measures will likely vary according to the extent of environmental rights consciousness observed among the populace, (digital) literacy rates, how technical information is presented to lay audiences, an individual’s financial situation, the extent to which modes of access and participation are presented in multiple languages, and the quality of a state’s technological infrastructure, among others. Fourth, rights may foster social outcomes. Examples of such outputs include protests, lobbying activities, the establishment of nonprofit or social movement organizations, and shifts in public opinion regarding the performance of political and judicial institutions.

532    Joshua C. Gellers and Chris Jeffords While most of these activities are likely integral to achieving sustained pressure on the government to enforce environmental rights, their availability as strategies useful to the public can be constrained by the level of protection afforded civil and political rights, popular fear of government reprisal for participating in social movement actions, the robustness of national philanthropic ecosystems, levels of social capital among the citizenry, and the financial wherewithal required to dedicate leisure time to engaging in social causes. Examining the implementation of environmental rights from multiple angles, such as those suggested here, will help determine whether these rights are mere paper tigers or the foundation for a real, sustained “rights revolution” (Epp 1998, p. 7).

Conclusion While the R2E and PERs have been around for decades and can now be found in every region of the world, systematic and fine-​grained analyses of their effectiveness are fairly recent additions to the literature. Scholarship on implementing the RoN, by contrast, has only just begun to take flight. Complementing these efforts are comprehensive global assessments about the utility of environmental rights as experienced by those on the front lines. However, these reports are piecemeal endeavors that tend to lack crucial information about ultimate outcomes associated with environmental rights provisions. As explained earlier, conceptual, practical, and empirical challenges continue to complicate the efforts of researchers and practitioners seeking to evaluate the conditions under which environmental rights matter (and to whom). We have sought not only to characterize the nature of these obstacles, but also to offer new directions for studying the implementation of environmental rights by widening the net of potential outcomes worth examining. In so doing, we hope to provide a roadmap useful for activists, citizens, lawyers, judges, policy-​makers, and scholars interested in adopting an evidence-​based approach to rights-​based forms of environmental protection. Additionally, in writing this chapter, we aim to clarify the relevance of environmental rights to the study of CEP. Such rights present fascinating and relatively untrammeled ground for assessing the role that national and subnational differences in institutions, organizations, and contentious politics play in the protection of people and nature. Importantly, students of CEP possess the analytical tools necessary to make significant contributions to our understanding of the conditions under which environmental rights lead to real improvements for all life on this planet. Given the limited window of opportunity available to enact the kind of large-​scale changes necessary to avoid climate catastrophe, time is a resource in short order. Yet, through rigorous design, application, and analysis of context-​specific institutions with collective goals in mind, humanity might just prove itself as capable of avoiding environmental disaster as it is proficient in generating it.

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Chapter 28

Ge ndering t h e Huma n Rig ht to Wat e r i n t h e C ontext of Su sta i na bl e Devel op me nt Farhana Sultana Introduction Water is life, as water is the one thing none of us can live without. However, we are witnessing increasing water crises and water struggles worldwide, where 2.5 billion people lack access to affordable, reliable, safe, clean water daily. While some can take water for granted, others suffer from the lack of clean, safe, affordable water. There is a significant difference in the histories, spatialities, and social differences in who has access to and control over what kind of water across the world. Lack of clean safe water hinders well-​being, public health, and overall progress of human societies as well as sustainable ecologies. Water is also essential for the abilities of all communities to flourish as a whole, as well as the abilities of individuals in every community to thrive. There is considerable variation in water availability across and between communities and countries, and many factors determine water insecurity. Water scarcity is a major cause of continued geopolitical tensions, intersectional suffering,1 impoverishment, various forms of marginalization, and hindered upward mobility. Everything depends on water, ultimately, connecting across spheres of economy, society, politics, culture, environment, and spirituality. The need to view water as a many-​splendored thing cannot be overstated. It is urgent and vital that we pay greater attention to the different ways that water insecurity affects people (Sultana and Loftus 2020). Water is vital for poverty alleviation and sustainable development globally. Water provision is increasingly framed as a moral and ethical responsibility for authorities as a way to move water beyond its economic valuation and the abilities of people to pay for it (Sultana 2018b). Building awareness and education on these issues can help promote understanding and acceptance of the importance of global water justice. Such concerns became starker during the COVID-​19 global pandemic when lack of water for handwashing, sanitation, hygiene,

Gendering the Human Right    539 and nutritious food compounded vulnerable peoples’ sufferings worldwide (Stoler, Jepson, and Wutich 2020; Loftus and Sultana 2020). The 2010 United Nations resolution on the human right to water urged the global community to accept and implement equitable access to safe clean water for all. In addition, the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the development targets for the global community between 2016 and 2030, articulated the importance of two interconnected and important SGDs: the connections between gender equity (in SDG5) and access to water (in SDG6). Given these global policy imperatives, countries face normative goals of achieving difficult and complex sets of rights and justices regarding water and gender equity. In this context, how policy prescriptions and ambitions can be materialized on the ground requires closer attention to the ways that gender–​water relations are co-​constitutive of broader issues of development and social justice in any context. Given this, more concerted action is necessary to address the socioecological issues that affect access to, control over, and rights to water, which have intersectional gendered implications and impact the lived realities of water justice and injustice on the ground. The chapter investigates the comparative politics around the human right to water and increasing commodification and privatization of water through a gendered lens to interrogate the SDGs. I argue that implementing the human right to water can help achieve wider intersectional gender equity and gender justice and thereby contribute toward the goals of sustainable development and an inclusive vision of the future. The chapter is structured as follows. I first discuss how and why water is an intersectional gender issue across societies, scales, policies, and governance structures. I then elaborate what the human right to water means and how gendering it is essential. I then discuss these in relation to the SDGs and growing crises of climate change and the commodification and privatization of water. I conclude with the ways that gender justice, the human right to water, and SDGs are co-​constitutive of each other.

How and Why Water Is a Gender Issue Many scholars have written about the terrains of gender–​water relations (Cleaver 1998; Cleaver and Elson 1995; Crow and Sultana 2002; O’Reilly et al. 2009; O’Reilly 2006; Harris et al. 2017; Truelove 2011; Wutich 2009; Sultana 2009b; 2020). Water is very much a gender issue because women and girls are burdened with providing water for their families worldwide, under various patriarchal norms and practices of gendered divisions of labor that reinforce domestic and reproductive labor along gender lines. As a result, women and girls are often the managers of water in the home for various purposes, such as drinking, cooking, bathing, cleaning, sanitation, livestock and poultry management, kitchen gardening, and small-​scale household-​based economic activities. In many places in the Global South, while men generally engage with productive water, such as irrigation for farming, women are primarily responsible for reproductive water needs, such as domestic water, and thus responsibilities for household water security. However, many small farmers are women, meaning they must contend with water for both productive and reproductive needs. In other words, livelihood needs for water need to be accounted for beyond drinking water needs (Sultana, Mohanty, and Miraglia 2016; Hellum 2017). Diverse bodily needs of thirst,

540   Farhana Sultana cleansing, purification, nutrition, sanitation, hygiene, and productive labor must become central to the focus of water provision, where access is not just about the physical distance to a water source, but about other barriers that exist, especially social access, cultural dynamics, and economic affordability (Hellum, Kameri-​Mbote, and van Koppen 2015; Sultana et al. 2016). Equitable water access is also about the quality of water, not just quantities, as water is often dirty or contaminated even if available, as demonstrated from cases around the world, such as the Middle East and North Africa (Zawahri, Sowers, and Weinthal 2011), South Asia (Sultana 2011), and Southern Africa (Harris et al. 2018). Overexploitation of the environment, ecological degradation, and contamination of water sources affect the poor disproportionately around the world, and, among the poor, this water insecurity impacts women and girls significantly, especially in female-​headed households. For instance, in a study from Uganda, water insecurity analysis showed that women often consumed less water or were forced to use contaminated water sources, which caused worry and poor health (Tsai et al. 2016). A study from Bolivia found that emotional distress from lack of safe or reliable water fell disproportionately on women and girls (Wutich 2009). Similarly, a study from Bangladesh demonstrated that more women compared to men mentioned both the emotional and physical burdens of water scarcity for their households (Sultana 2011). Inadequate water supplies or lack of access to safe reliable water results in women and girls spending hundreds of hours a week globally fetching or securing precious water for their homes. Those who may have somewhat secure water access might not have control over this valuable resource. Insecurity of water affects not only the abilities of individuals to carry out daily tasks and responsibilities, but jeopardizes the well-​being of the entire household. Girls often drop out of school and miss out on educational opportunities when they have to help fetch water for their families. For instance, in sub-​Saharan Africa, a study found statistically significant differences between the number of school days missed by girls compared to boys due to water insecurity because girls had to prioritize water fetching instead of their education (Cooper-​Vince et al. 2017). This has a significant impact not only on girls’ education but also on the future of society as a whole as it impacts girls and women over their life cycles. Water insecurity causes women of all ages to lose out on income-​generating activities, further opportunities for advancement, tending to other responsibilities, or even resting when they have to spend hours each day procuring water for their households. The various water crises globally thus have severe gendered ramifications that are both inter-​and intragenerational, limiting the options and opportunities for millions of people across places and age groups. While there are commonalities across marginalized communities, the Global South is not an undifferentiated space. Differences by privilege within communities and countries, often correlated to class status, influence which households have better access to water than others in the same area. Nonetheless, significant commonalities result in millions of households across the Global South that do not have safe, reliable water on a daily basis. Gendered differences in how people relate to water are influenced by a predominantly gendered division of labor in and outside the home, the relationship to water resources based on tasks and responsibilities, the valuation of women’s and girl’s labor and time, and their decision-​making powers in general. Similarly, social norms of who does what also place differential burdens of water-​related activities across different groupings of people (e.g., younger women are often tasked with water responsibilities whereas older or more senior women may not be) (Sultana 2009b). The relationship that marginalized groups have

Gendering the Human Right    541 to water is often different from those who are less directly affected by or dependent on water daily. Men and women across social strata prioritize different aspects of water such as quantity, quality, reliability, timing, and cost. For instance, in a study from Bangladesh, men focused more on costs and prices, whereas women emphasized equity of access and improved services, as this reduces their burdens (Sultana 2020). The externalization of costs (that are physical, social, emotional) onto women and girls results in obscuring the true cost of obtaining water beyond its monetary price. In instances of no household water connections, women and girls in sub-​Saharan Africa spent several trips per day to fetch water, each trip varying between 30 minutes to 1 hour (WHO 2017). Cumulatively, the relative time burdens are gendered invisible costs that vary comparatively across rural and urban areas in the same country and by social disparities (such as class, race), and across countries. Thus accessibility is a significant component of ensuring a gendered human right to water. In an international comparative study undertaken by the World Health Organization (WHO) comparing the reliability of household water supplies, accessibility varied across countries (WHO 2017). For instance, Albania had 60% continuous daily supplies while Paraguay reported 86%. This also varies by season (e.g., dry seasons have more irregular water supplies) as well as frequencies of interruptions of supplies. The source of water varies considerably across regions and countries, and households often rely on multiple sources of water simultaneously; water obtained from piped water, boreholes (tubewells), surface water sources, rainwater, protected and unprotected dug wells, and springs. Having fixed infrastructure or technology in place does not mean reliable safe water supplies daily because water quality, accessibility, or reliability are frequently a problem. For instance, in many wealthier countries, domestic piped water supplies are vulnerable to shut-​offs among poor communities (e.g., Flint, Michigan, in the United States), resulting in intersectional racialized and gendered sufferings in communities of color (Clark 2020). The quality of water available also varies considerably: in Bangladesh, 58% of water at source was contaminated with Escherichia coli, necessitating boiling of water to treat it (WHO 2017). This places additional burdens on households to obtain fuel or firewood, often a gendered labor and an additional household expense. Water requirements also go beyond drinking or productive needs of water, to issues of adequate sanitation, hygiene, privacy, gender-​based violence in accessing water or sanitation locations, and a host of issues that can remain obscured or illegible at policy levels (Hellum, Kameri-​Mbote, and van Koppen 2015). For example, a lack of sufficient toilet facilities for women and girls in communities results in them having to walk farther from their homes for sanitation and hygiene; this has resulted in cases of gender-​based violence and assault in India and Brazil, among other places (Silva et al. 2020; Kulkarni, O’Reilly, and Bhat 2017). Given global policy discourses on the need to advance gender rights and empowerment, ensuring the human right to water for women and girls becomes critical. This means that water must be available in sufficient quantity, quality, safety, affordability, acceptability, and reliability to reduce gendered burdens and consequences of water insecurity. Reducing the physical, economic, social, and emotional burdens of the daily toil of fetching or securing domestic and productive water is a way to ensure greater well-​being and welfare of girls and women worldwide, especially in developing countries (Hellum 2017; Sultana 2011). Barriers vary by community and country, but often these are tied to lack of economic resources or social capital of households, political will of influential people to ensure broader water security, lack of legal instruments available to people to contest injustices, and lack of policy

542   Farhana Sultana commitment to ensure the progressive realization of the human right to water (Sultana and Loftus 2020). Conversely, since water enables flourishing in other arenas of life for women and girls, ensuring household water security can mean achieving the goals of the SDGs more quickly overall. There are multiple avenues through which this occurs. First is the reduction of drudgery, precarity, suffering, and labor in having a secure water source. Then are the benefits of health and hygiene from clean water, and better food and nutrition options (from cleaning food items to having sufficient clean water to cook, bathe, and wash). Having time saved from waiting on or travelling to fetch water means that women and girls have educational, employment, and health opportunities, thereby reducing gender disparities. These have knock-​on benefits of income, opportunities, well-​being, and networking. Options to enhance choice, freedoms, and capabilities become possible when unburdened of the shackles of not having water. The foundational requirement of water for meeting any SDGs thus cannot be overstated. However, gender is often overlooked or dealt with in problematic manners in water management policies and water politics. Gender-​blindness has been a common critique of policies and programs; only 37% of the countries affiliated with the UN produce sex-​ disaggregated data on access to clean water regularly, while the majority did so episodically (Seager 2015). Lack of regularity thereby reduced abilities to monitor and measure gender disparities in water at national levels and to address problems in timely ways. Furthermore, the differences between national-​and international-​level discourses around gender equity often do not translate to local levels, especially at community and household levels, where water insecurity remains rife. The disjuncture is profound when goals and policies prioritize technocratic and centralized planning and implementations while various social norms and patriarchy subvert or complicate the achievement of these. The differences between water users versus water managers, which often occur along gender lines whereby men occupy positions of decision-​making and public power, as well as scalar disparities in materializing actualized gains of water policies that are equitable, continue to remain underinvestigated. A recent study found a gender gap in freshwater tenure rights and human right to water in communities across Asia, Africa, and Latin America. The study analyzed 39 community freshwater tenure cases across 15 countries and found “Laws regulating community-​ based freshwater rights are typically gender-​blind, with just one-​third of legal frameworks protecting women’s rights to use or govern community freshwater resources” (Keene, Troell, and Ginsburg 2020, p. 35). The 13 gender-​sensitive arrangements ensured women’s governance rights, participation rights, and user rights to water under national law. Comparatively, countries of Africa fared better, having specific legal language to ensure women’s rights to participate in and govern community water sources. Approximately 60% of African countries, compared to 44% of Asian countries and 15% of Latin American countries, provided gender-​sensitive legal protections to ensure women’s rights to use and govern community freshwater sources (Keene et al. 2020). The study found that while 60% of the countries collectively studied had national-​level protections for the human right to water, only 33% had specific provisions for women’s rights to water, participation in water governance, or to access dispute resolution mechanisms. These are essential components of ensuring a gendered human right to water since constitutional uptake of the rhetoric of gender equity often occurs without material operationalization on the ground if adequate mechanisms, financial support, and legal avenues are absent in overwhelmingly patriarchal contexts

Gendering the Human Right    543 (van Koppen et al. 2015). A lack of meaningfully and adequately ensuring the protection of women’s human right to water not only undermines goals to empower women and gender minorities, but can also result in more significant burdens and marginalizations. Furthermore, while gendered differences are predominant in most societies, this has to be filtered through intersectionality analysis. Intersectionalities by race, class, caste, disability, sexuality, and age are common ways that gender must be understood beyond the binaries of men/​women because gender is co-​constituted by other social axes of difference (Crenshaw 1991; Collins 2007). While class disparities are the most common markers of differentiation that allow wealthier women to have better access to safe, clean water more reliably (because of purchasing power, political clout, and social capital) compared to impoverished women in the same community, there are other variables (Rodina and Harris 2016; Sultana et al. 2016). For instance, white women in settler colonial contexts of the United States generally enjoy more privileges in secure water access than do racialized women of color, who are also often poorer, as demonstrated in the case of Flint, Michigan (Mayfield et al. 2017). In India, caste difference is often reproduced in higher caste households having more readily accessible and reliable water sources, while lower caste households (often more impoverished) have more insecure water access (O’Reilly and Dhanju 2014). These are just exemplars of the importance of understanding gender in intersectional ways (Cleaver and Hamada 2010; Crow and Sultana 2002). Thus, all invocations of gender need to be understood as intersectional gender, where gender is a set of power relations co-​constitutive of other contextual axes of oppression. This means not seeing women as a homogenous or unitary category, but recognizing and addressing how class, caste, race, etc. come to intersect with gender in producing different gendered subjectivities in relation to water (Sultana, 2009b). While official data-​gathering mechanisms don’t always approach gender intersectionally, research studies have demonstrated the necessity of doing so.

Gendering the Human Right to Water Now let me turn to the human right to water, what it means, and why gendering it is essential. Human rights language in development policies and international aid has raised concerns whether these enhance human well-​being or development (Bakker 2007). However, rights-​ talk has a powerful role in advancing justice and is often used by marginalized and oppressed groups. Rights often redress injustices rather than only alleviate suffering or address crises. Rights-​talk can also promote institutional, policy, legal, and regulatory changes (Sultana and Loftus 2015). However, translating rights to actual change on the ground and practical implementation is where contestations can arise, in that issues of accountability, inclusion, transparency, political commitment, and democratic participation become controversial. A lack of clarity and different understandings of rights can result in confusion and obfuscation. Similarly, not everyone is knowledgeable about rights that exist and their abilities to exercise rights, are aware of the outlets for that, and how these rights sit alongside other realities of their lives. As a result, many rights remain on paper and not actualized. Rights are never static, or beyond politics; instead, they are forged, reconfigured, understood, and practiced through politics and power (Yuval-​Davis 1997). Nonetheless, rights remain a powerful tool to redress injustices and foster collectivizing around water justice.

544   Farhana Sultana Any discussion on rights has to include a discussion of the state because the state has duties to rights-​holders (Sultana and Loftus 2012, 2020). The progressive realization of the right to water is important as not all states can fulfill their obligation quickly (Heller 2020). Whether a country has legal instruments and legislation in place for the right to water to be realized remains critical. For instance, in South Africa, the right to water is enshrined in the constitution; conversely, in the United States, it is not (Conca 2005; Bond 2012). This means that legal and policy instruments available to citizens to realize the right to water vary by country. Competing claims to the state’s resources mean water is one of many issues that the state has to fund, legislate, regulate, and monitor. In addition to the state, non-​state actors and civil society play an important role in ensuring the right to water is operationalized in meaningful ways. At the international level, the UN Office of the High Commissioner on Human Rights (OHCHR) has been instrumental in policy guidance on the human right to water. Civil society organizations, such as Blue Planet Project (Canada), Food and Water Watch (USA), Red Vida (Bolivia), Transnational Institute (Netherlands), and WaterAid (UK), among others, have been central to advancing the debates around the right to water at international and national levels, as well as mobilizing social movements around water justice. At local levels, many nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) are instrumental in enacting the right to water through their water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) programs; awareness and education campaigns; negotiations with communities and the state; and advocacy work.2 The human right to water in policy involves a range of issues beyond discursive uptake or constitutionalizing of the right to water; it extends to meaningful participation, decision-​making, accountability, monitoring, and transparency in water governance. The right to water is about social relations: it carries both moral and political weight, and it should open up conversations about what is possible, rather than what is prescribed or reductionist (Rodina and Harris 2016; Sultana 2020). Constitutionalizing the human right to water doesn’t necessarily produce material gains, as operationalizing the right requires ongoing efforts, whereby process comes to matter (Heller 2020). The right to water is often conflated to mean individual access to water as property, which is an incorrect assumption. While related, property rights being directly linked to the human right to water shifts the argument away from juridical powers and rights framework to property ownership, which is often historically skewed across societies; conflating to property rights also limits collective action among disenfranchised groups toward water access (Sultana and Loftus 2020). The right to water can enable collectivizing and mobilizing around ethical and moral claims on water too. It has been used to critique injustices in water management and inequitable development plans that involve water. The right to water can further be a strategic tool for the disenfranchised to have a voice. Rights language is often the only legible voice to powerful institutions and thus affords certain weight in invoking it. While rights can be claimed by those deemed to be citizens, even those not deemed to be worthy citizens can mobilize and use rights-​talk to claim citizenship (Rüegger 2012). Some scholars posit that the right to water discourse can be important for advocacy and voice but it should be used strategically (Hall, Lobina, and Motte 2005; Swyngedouw 2005). Thus, translating abstract rights-​talk to implementable policy and concrete outcomes takes intentional effort, including collaborations among people in various communities and those involved in legal, technical, policy, and academic fields.

Gendering the Human Right    545 For rights to be realized, it is crucial to recognize that rights involve responsibilities, which is not lost on the world’s poor. They are not demanding free water when they invoke the right to water, but rather that they want to be included in decision-​making about the equitable allocation of affordable water. For instance, in a study from Dhaka, Bangladesh, a higher percentage of women compared to men desired publicly provided (municipal) affordable water connections that enabled them to realize their human right to water; they equated publicly provided affordable water, instead of purchased water from illegal water vendors, as being tied to their understanding of being valuable citizens of the city (Sultana 2020). Often, rights language is used to promote the “public-​ness” of water or the “commoning” of water, rather than the privatization of water which involves dispossession and exclusion (Yuval-​Davis 1997). However, private corporations that promote the privatization and commodification of water, where profit motives drive water provision, have also appropriated human rights language problematically. They claim to be fulfilling the human right to water, but at a cost, which makes clean water unaffordable to many (Bakker 2007). Thus, communities fighting to realize the human right to water insist on clarification of the costs, accountability, and transparency of such efforts, frequently arguing for water to remain a public good (Sultana and Loftus 2012). Profit-​seeking water industries that claim to be fulfilling the right to water do not necessarily mean the actual realization of this goal, as was evident in the Cochabamba water wars of 2000 (Mehta et al. 2014; Bustamante, Crespo, and Walnycki 2012). Thus, quantity is not the main criteria of the right to water, as quality, affordability, accessibility, availability, reliability, and acceptability are critically important (Heller 2020). By focusing on these criteria, the right to water can be actualized, rather than just simply expanding connections and providing expensive privatized water for purchase. Rights operate in conjunction with social norms and power relations that affect water access, use, and claims-​making in every context (Hellum 2017). Grounding the right to water through analyses of gendered struggles of water and claims to inclusive citizenship and democracy thus become necessary. A critical issue for understanding the right to water is that universal human rights are gendered (Zwarteveen and Meinzen-​Dick 2001; Sangameswaran 2012; Zwarteveen 2008). Unfortunately, gender-​blindness in water policies and programs often overlook this (Hellum et al. 2015). Debates on the right to water have focused more on issues of class and racial differences in access. Gendering brings to attention how a right to water is productive and generative for some people more than others due to alleviating gender-​based labor and gendered social norms (as discussed in the prior section of this chapter). How women and men of different backgrounds and positionalities view rights is an important issue since formalization may not have much purchase if benefits aren’t understood or materialized (Kanyongolo et al. 2011). Where the right to water has been officially accepted, these rights are not easily translated to women, who are the right-​ bearers, due to contextual challenges. For instance, in a study from Malawi, it was found that women rarely see themselves as rights-​bearers and thus do not participate in water governance or hold service providers more accountable (Singh et al. 2008). A study of rural water supply systems in India found that women could not exercise their right to water due to existing sociocultural norms, beliefs, and perceptions that hinder the realization of their right to water (Ahlers and Zwarteveen 2009; O’Reilly et al. 2009; Truelove 2011). However, an urban study from Bangladesh found that women worked within their communities to mobilize claims to their right to water and advocate for public water services in their

546   Farhana Sultana informal settlements (Sultana 2020). The comparative difference in each case results from greater local awareness of human rights in communities, involvement of NGOs in local areas that worked as a conduit between disenfranchised communities and state officials, and women working hard to ensure their voices were included despite patriarchal barriers to voicing public opinions in their communities. The state having formally adopted the human right to water in policy or law allowed communities to make claims to the state. Thus, both local and national adoption of the human right to water play important roles (Angel and Loftus 2019). In sum, gendering the human right to water effectively means ensuring that women and girls, as well as men and boys, have equal access to realizing their right to water that is clean, safe, reliable, affordable, and acceptable. Failure of governments to ensure the right to water results in increased burdens for women and girls (Agarwal 2001; Sultana 2009a; Adams, Juran, and Ajibade 2018). These result in the reduction of rights to dignity and well-​being. Gender equity and well-​being are fostered through the provision of safe, clean, reliable water daily. Nevertheless, it has to go beyond just having water to influence decision-​making and planning that affects water governance locally. The differentiated power relations and inequities that exist further disenfranchise impoverished people through the improper governance of water. Therefore, in advancing water justice that accounts for gender justice, attention is needed as to how water is governed, so that meaningful, inclusive, participatory, and democratic processes are created to actualize the human right to water (Hellum et al. 2015). Inadequate access to information and decision-​making powers generally leave out the powerless from influencing policies that impact their lives. The social norms and regimes of gender participation and gendered exclusions can further discount women’s and girls’ voices and opinions in planning processes (Sultana 2009a). Powerful or elite women often capture attention but do not represent all women in their communities; representative inclusion thus has to go beyond essentializing that all women in a location share the same experience, since differences can exist across intersectionalities such as class, race, and so forth, even if women as a collective group may experience greater marginalizations and exclusions overall (Sultana 2009a; Agarwal 2001). Such meaningful attention to relevant intersectional differences allows for better achievement of the gendered human right to water in any context. Involvement of women has to be representative of the diverse groups of women, not tokenistic. This requires an intersectional understanding of gender and rigorous implementation where marginalized voices and experiences are accounted for. Tokenistic representation of women only in planning or management will fail to address issues of water injustice across class, ethnic, racial, caste, sexuality, and other relevant categories (Brown 2010). Intersectionality must be taken seriously in policy-​making, decision-​making, and institutional practices. Greater accountability and inclusion is thus necessary. The continued dispossession that many face in water governance policy and practice points to the great need to shift planning processes and project implementation toward more equitable systems that focus on social justice more broadly. However, gendering the right to water requires ensuring women’s participation in water governance in inclusive and representative ways without disregarding their other labor responsibilities. It can act as a triple burden for women, who then become responsible for domestic/​reproductive and productive water and the community labor of participating in local water governance. Thus, due care in planning and implementation is necessary but not always sufficient. At the same time, it must not be assumed that just having women in

Gendering the Human Right    547 decision-​making spaces will result in their being heard or taken into account. Exclusionary politics exists everywhere, and feminist scholars have pointed to the ways that women are marginalized, silenced, spoken over, or ignored in most decision-​making forums (Roth, Boelens, and Zwarteveen 2015; Zwarteveen and Meinzen-​Dick 2001). Participation of women is crucial to ensuring gendered balance—​but participation is a complex and problematic process where gendered exclusions are widespread. If the household is the unit used to determine the right to water, quantities may not be sufficient or equitably divided. Giving women specific rights to water can increase their bargaining power in and outside the household as well as make more secure their existing rights and resources (Harris et al. 2018). A comparative study of water user associations in South Asia found that more formal participation of women resulted in their benefiting more from water agreements, but gender biases that prevented women from participating had to be overcome first through training and awareness-​raising (Meinzen-​Dick and Zwarteveen 1998; Sultana 2009a). Policy discourses that are not implemented conscientiously result in gendered impacts that can have opposite results, thereby linking the state to continued or new gendered neglect and sufferings (Flores Baquero, Jiménez, and Pérez Foguet 2016). This connects policy imperatives on the human right to water to formal gender equity policies and goals that are overtly, as well as not so overtly, stated in the policy documents of many nation-​states (such as the SDGs). The connection between water policy imperatives and formal gender equity goals and policies becomes more apparent when analyzed together. Materializing the right to water thus becomes critical in empowering disenfranchised populations to access water as a group and address the gendered relations of power and division of labor in patriarchal contexts within these groups. Even in places where the right to water has been officially formalized in policy or law, these rights are not easily actualized for marginalized women, who are technically the right-​bearers, due to contextual challenges (such as cultural perceptions, social norms, financial ability, and other factors). For instance, social barriers due to lack of household social capital and political connection, and poverty levels, precluded women in a study in rural Bangladesh from adequately accessing public water sources that existed or were installed on the lands of wealthier households (Sultana 2011). Class relations and political patronage saturated water access and household water security in this instance, whereby water comes to be about power. The price paid was intersectionally gendered and often silently suffered by poorer and younger women and girls. Social norms and power relations affect water access and use, and what may appear to be fair on paper may not in reality be so. Knowledge and information have to be widely available to and accessible by people, accounting for literacy rates and other social obstructions to accessing information. Lack of knowledge of rights and options can lead to being exploited by different constituents as well as not obtaining what is legally available. Translating the goals of the right to water to meaningful outcomes means addressing contextual socioecological relations of power. Gendered inequalities operate and manifest across a range of factors, and ignoring these intersectionalities results in failing to work toward gender-​sensitive solutions. Policy discourses on commitments to fulfilling state obligations to the right to water often remain primarily lip service and are mired in a range of conflicts, cross-​scalar politics, and water governance challenges in many countries around the world—​whether it is for the racialized minority communities in Flint, Michigan, or the urban poor living precarious lives in informal settlements in Lagos, Nigeria, or Jakarta, Indonesia.

548   Farhana Sultana

SDGs, the Right to Water, and Ongoing Challenges Human rights are always open to violation, and legal instruments cannot always powerfully change social dynamics. However, these systems and instruments are crucial to have in place to ensure that recourse and redress are possible. In addition, democratic institutions have to exist that enable equitable water governance and conflict resolution. Beyond formal institutions and legal mechanisms, women’s struggles and self-​organization (e.g., as in the Bangladesh case mentioned earlier, among others) point to the ways that gender justice goes beyond formal policy or planning and often work in conjunction with or in resistance to existing policies in place (e.g., failures to measure up to materializing gains of better water access). Thus, institutionalizing the right to water, and then operationalizing and maintaining it, requires sustained efforts by various actors. Broader gender justice and social justice goals are supported through the right to water when undertaken thoughtfully and methodically by different state and non-​state actors, thereby linking the two SDGs of gender equity and water access. SDGs should be interpreted through a human rights framework, where the right to water is but one such example (Sultana 2018a; Buechler 2009; Tschakert and Machado 2012). Regular local monitoring of the implementation outcomes of the human right to water is essential for equity purposes because it contributes to the progressive realization of this right so that data on quality, quantity, availability, reliability, participation, and conflict-​resolution are available (Heller 2020). Such data allow for comparative analyses but also address disparities and problems as they arise. This information can then inform national-​scale data collection and analyses undertaken comparatively by international programs, such as the Joint Monitoring Program (JMP) of the World Health Organization and UNICEF, that monitor the progress of SDG 6.3 All the complexities detailed in earlier sections are vitally important in light of two growing crises that are affecting the human right to water and fulfillment of SDGs. First, climate change makes water more insecure, with variability in water-​related events such as floods, droughts, and storms that place greater stress on water sources. This will further worsen gendered inequities in water. Climate change will exacerbate existing disparities and create new water crises, underscoring the need to have democratic and responsive institutions and mechanisms in place to respond adequately to changing circumstances. Given these growing challenges, we must consider local societal differences and realities more carefully in order to combat climate change’s impact on realizing the human right to water in each context. The relationship between gender, climate change, and water is a growing body of scholarship that can lend insights (Sultana 2018a; Buechler 2018). Second, commodification and privatization of water make water more unaffordable, especially for the world’s poor, as water that is given a market value with a profit logic by corporations that control water extraction and distribution tend to strip water of all its other values (e.g., spiritual, cultural, social, collectivizing, etc.). This has severe impacts on poor women, especially female-​headed households, as they are pushed out of the market when they cannot afford to purchase water that is priced to produce a profit (Brown 2010). When water is too expensive to purchase, households tend to use more readily accessible water sources that are often contaminated or insecure. However, increasing privatization of

Gendering the Human Right    549 water utilities and water providers globally, often under the oversight of the largest water corporations (e.g., Suez, Veolia) and their subsidiaries, has appropriated the right to water language in bids to commodify and privatize water sources whereby clean safe water can only be afforded at a premium cost (Sultana et al. 2016; Sultana and Loftus 2012; Bakker 2007). To this end, keeping water as a public good promotes gender justice as the human right to water becomes easier to implement more fairly and equitably. Patriarchy and capitalist hegemony are linked, and privatization ends up being a process that enforces both (Jepson, Wutich, and Harris 2020). Water privatization is related to global austerity measures, global political economy of water, international donors/​investors, and state policies, whereby local voices are often unheard or unaccounted for. Community-​based organizations where gender is centered, accounted for, and heeded appropriately in context thus become essential to counter such forces, along with the work of various water justice movements (e.g., Food and Water Watch, Blue Planet Project, Municipal Services Project). Ensuring relationships that foster household water security over time are critical (Mehta et al. 2014; Joy et al. 2014; Jepson et al. 2017). Considering both these challenges of climate change and commodification of water that are ongoing and becoming more prescient, it becomes even more important to ensure water governance that is attuned to gender justice, inclusive democracy, solidarity, and sustainable development. Critical effort must be enhanced to keep water in the commons, as a public good, with democratic water governance fostered and supported. Otherwise, any attempts to promote a culture or ethic of water justice will be subverted (Heller 2016). Therefore, there are moral and ethical imperatives in supporting endeavors and enhancing global education about all these issues in order to ensure the human right to water for all. The processes of realizing the human right to water become important beyond just the outcome (McDonald 2016). The global political economy of water is mired in a range of conflicting forces. However, in the context of development and aid in the Global South, there are continued problems of privatizing conditionalities from international donors, overlooking the violation of human rights for economic gain/​growth, trade liberalization, and private water corporation takeovers of municipal utilities (McDonald and Ruiters 2012; McDonald, Marois, and Spronk 2021). Such trends need to be watched more closely. Whether the right to water can advance goals of gender equity and fulfill SDGs, and vice versa, must be interrogated contextually and with a critical understanding of the misuse of rights-​talk as well as the failures of delivery and the processes involved. Nonetheless, meaningful implementation of the right to water has the real potential to advance intersectional gender justice. Translating the right to water on the ground means paying attention to local norms and power relations and not assuming that discursive claims or policy shifts will lead to changes in reality. No policy ever fully does, mired as policies usually are in socioecologies and power dynamics. While the progressive realization of the right to water can ease gendered burdens, it cannot solve all gendered discriminations, such as menstrual taboos and caste–​water relations in places where this is prevalent. Patriarchy needs to be addressed and dismantled in each context. Similarly, class-​based resistance to disenfranchised and minority groups being included in planning and decision-​making are also challenges that need to be overcome. This is why the right to water has to be realized slowly and with due care, taking into account existing intersectional challenges and barriers. It is not an instant fix, but it has the powerful potential to foster solutions and open up spaces for difficult conversations needed to address inequity, exploitation, and injustice.

550   Farhana Sultana

Conclusion This chapter has argued that gendering the right to water and showing how the right to water can advance the goals of the gender equity SDG can be mutually reinforcing. The right to water and gender equity are linked—​the former can enable the latter, and the latter cannot be achieved without the former. Water justice requires attention to both the right to water and gendered power relations in local water governance and lived water realities. However, just providing water will not bring about all women’s empowerment equally, as intersectionality analyses demonstrate that gender is co-​constitutive of class, race, caste, etc. Nonetheless, not having water will impair the goals of gender equity. Each imperative thus must co-​exist and co-​evolve contextually to ensure equity and justice. The human right to water does important discursive and material work, as it enables broader engagement with contestations over citizenship, democracy, and social justice. It highlights the uneven and inequitable access to water and the need for water justice. There is an ongoing need to push for both social policies and processes, as processes matter as much as policies that foster equity and justice. More financial commitment to universal access is necessary, as austerity measures in many countries do the opposite. Gender equity or gender justice are often worsened with the commodification and privatization of water. Privatization focuses on individualized gains and privileges at the expense of public equity and ideals of equality across differences. Making space for meaningful participation, accountability, and mechanisms for monitoring, transparency, and recourse is critical. Lack of participation, or even of consultation, have gendered implications that are inter-​and intragenerational. This affects not only the poor, but also those who are further marginalized through race, disability, sexuality, religion, or other forms of locally relevant forms of intersectional difference. Gendered inequalities thus operate and manifest across a range of factors, and ignoring these, as is often the case, results in failing to work toward meaningful gender-​sensitive solutions. If the normative global goals of the SDGs and the human right to water are to be fulfilled, feminist scholarship and lessons learned from local social justice movements both need to be engaged more critically and thoughtfully in policy-​making, planning, implementation, and evaluation.

Notes 1. Intersectionality means the overlapping oppressions that people experience, and these axes of social difference generally occur along the intersecting lines of gender, class, race, ability, age, and so on that are most relevant in a place (Crenshaw 1991; Collins and Bilge 2016). For instance, some women of color experience oppression due to both their gender and their race. An impoverished person with a disability faces more structural barriers and challenges than a wealthy person with the same disability. Intersectional suffering thus differentiates people within the same society. 2. There are increasing numbers of NGOs (or nonprofits) involved in water provision globally. These range from large international ones with local affiliates across countries (e.g.,

Gendering the Human Right    551 WaterAid, Charity Water, etc.) to innumerable local or national water-​focused NGOs across countries funded through various sources. 3. JMP is shorthand for WHO/​UNICEF Joint Monitoring Programme for Water Supply, Sanitation and Hygiene at the United Nations. While this is a popular source of data, there are limitations in the JMP monitoring system (Zawahri, Sowers, and Weinthal 2011).

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Pa rt V I

NAT U R A L R E S OU RC E S A N D P OL I T IC A L E C ON OM Y

Chapter 29

G reen Indust ria l P ol icy in C om pa rat i v e Perspect i v e Supporting Renewable Energy Industry Development in Emerging Economies Joanna I. Lewis Introduction The deployment of renewable energy (RE) is increasing around the world, driven in part by the global climate commitments that have been adopted by almost 200 countries under the Paris Agreement. In 2019, there was more RE power capacity added than ever before in a single year, more than 200 GW (REN21 Secretariat 2020). As a result, global energy-​related carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from fossil fuels and industry have slowed, even as global energy demand and gross domestic production (GDP) increased. It is therefore important to understand how countries are adopting national strategies to promote green growth through RE development. Countries are using a variety of domestic policies to encourage the deployment of renewables. A key part of this approach are policies and measures that not only create a demand for RE, but also that promote the development of local RE technology industries (Lewis and Wiser 2007). These measures are often referred to as “green industrial policies,” as they include a variety of protectionist measures that encourage domestic manufacturing for RE and raise barriers to foreign entry into domestic markets, setting up an inherent tension between low-​carbon development and international trade. Not all countries are well-​positioned to become competitive exporters of the same green technologies, yet many will try regardless. New entrants can be threatening to current industry leaders but can also create global benefits; for example, new market entrants can lead to more competition in the sector and encourage further technological innovation (Lewis 2014). But, in general, protectionism creates market inefficiencies and increases costs in an already disadvantaged sector. Studies have shown that protectionist policies result in more

560   Joanna I. Lewis expensive RE technology and projects, which hurt the pace of deployment in the long term (Deringer et al. 2018; Hufbauer et al. 2013). Higher costs are particularly problematic for developing counties where resources are already scarce and high project prices for first-​ of-​their-​kind renewable projects can hurt the long-​term prospects for the industry. This suggests that developing countries, in particular, face a difficult balance between wanting to benefit from RE industry development and bearing the added costs of such an energy transition (Hochstetler and Kostka 2015). This chapter therefore informs the study of key issues that have long been studied in comparative environmental politics; namely North–​South equity in addressing global environmental challenges like climate change. This chapter begins by reviewing the policies and incentives commonly used to support RE deployment and the policies and incentives used to support the localization of RE manufacturing, with an eye toward understanding which countries are employing which policies. It then turns to a review of the green industrial policy strategies of the Chinese wind sector and the Indian solar sector—​two examples of using green industrial policy with different outcomes. Finally, it turns to broader implications and policy recommendations for the new set of emerging and developing countries signaling their interest in moving in this direction and following the lead of China, India, and others.

Policies and Incentives for Renewable Energy Deployment Governments around the world have prioritized the development of RE technologies with a range of policies and incentives. Policy tools can be used to adjust relative prices to encourage the adoption of alternative energy technologies through subsidies or other forms of public support. To garner such public support, however, political rationale for RE, such as carbon mitigation or improving local air pollution, is increasingly linked to economic rationales, namely job creation and technological leadership.1 The countries that first pursued the large-​scale deployment of wind and solar power technologies used a variety of policies to help renewables compete with conventional energy sources, including subsidization or other market interventions. While the specific measures implemented in any domestic context may change from year to year, most countries have relied on relatively similar types of support mechanisms over time. Such policies are implemented at various levels of government, including the central and subnational levels. The International Energy Agency (IEA) and the International RE Agency’s (IRENA) Database of Global Renewable Energy Policies and Measures divide the most commonly used RE policy tools into six broad categories: (1) economic instruments; (2) information and education; (3) policy support; (4) regulatory instruments; (5) research, development, and deployment; and (6) voluntary approaches. The subcategories of policies that fall under each heading are listed in Table 29.1. Figure 29.1 illustrates the policy types that are most frequently utilized in global RE markets. By far the most common policy type is a national RE target. A total of 168 countries around the world have adopted targets for increasing their share of RE or non-​fossil energy, and many of these targets are enshrined in their Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) pledged as part of the Paris Agreement (REN21 Secretariat 2020; UNFCCC

Green Industrial Policy in Comparative Perspective    561 Table 29.1 Types of policy instruments used to support renewable energy

deployment Policy

Instrument Type

Specific Instrument

Economic instruments

Direct investment

Funds to subnational governments Infrastructure investments Procurement rules RD&D funding

Fiscal/​financial incentives

Feed-​in tariffs/​premiums Grants and subsidies Loans Tax relief Taxes User charges

Market-​based instruments

GHG emissions allowances Green certificates White certificates

Information and education

Advice/​aid in implementation Information provision Performance label Comparison label Endorsement label Professional training and qualification

Policy support

Institutional creation Strategic planning

Regulatory instruments

Auditing Codes and standards

Building codes and standards Product standards Sectoral standards Vehicle fuel-​economy and emissions standards

Monitoring Obligation schemes Other mandatory requirements Research, development and deployment (RD&D)

Demonstration projects Research programs

Voluntary approaches

Negotiated agreements (public-​private sector) Public voluntary schemes Unilateral commitments (private sector)

Technology deployment and diffusion Technology development

Source: IEA/​IRENA 2016.

Secretariat 2020; IRENA 2018). While these targets are often nonbinding, many countries that adopt them also have national energy plans in place. These plans usually involve some sort of modeling of what is possible in terms of expanding RE deployment in the country, setting national targets, and laying out strategies to achieve such targets. In addition to RE targets, countries also implement a variety of other domestic policies to incentivize RE development. Fiscal and financial incentives are among the most popular and

562   Joanna I. Lewis National RE Target RE Target in NDC Tax Incentives Public investment, loans, grants, capital subsidies or rebates Reductionss in sales, energy, CO2, VAT or other taxes Tendering Feed-in tariff Transport obligation Net metering Investment or production tax credits RPS/Quota/Obligation Tradable REC Energy production payment Heat obligation 0

20

40 60 80 100 120 140 Number of countries where policy has been implemented

160

180

Figure 29.1  Renewable energy (RE) policies implemented in next-​generation RE markets. Database includes 198 countries. Several countries have employed more than one policy type so are counted multiple times in the figure. Source: Lewis (2021).

effective ways to promote wind and solar power development. A feed-​in tariff (FIT) provides a fixed price to the renewable power facility for power generated from an RE source over a set time period (often 20 years). The payment is usually administered by the utility company or the grid operator and is derived from an additional per kilowatt-​hour (kWh) charge for electricity. Another popular incentive is a renewable portfolio standard (RPS), also referred to as a renewable purchase obligation (RPO) or RE quota, which requires a utility to procure a certain percentage of its total electricity portfolio from renewable sources. The most popular way to promote large projects is through tendering, which does not require an extensive policy support framework in the way that a FIT or an RPS does. While FITs are still far more widely used than quotas or RPS, many countries still have neither. Other popular incentives to promote renewables include tax incentives, public investments (including loans, grants, subsidies, and rebates), and tax rebates. Of the 168 countries that have national RE targets, 115 have enshrined their RE targets in their NDCs. Looking at the geographic distribution of countries that have signaled RE targets in their NDCs, the largest shares fall in sub-​Saharan Africa (29%) and East Asia/​ Pacific (22%), followed by Latin America and the Caribbean (21%), and the Middle East and North Africa (13%), as illustrated in Figure 29.2. These regions are not currently the largest users of RE and comprise primarily developing and emerging countries. Few of these countries are large emitters of greenhouse gases, so RE is not being promoted for climate reasons alone. The motivation behind RE promotion differs across countries, with both domestic and international factors driving decision-​making. Countries that rely on costly, imported fossil energy, such as island nations, often promote the use of renewables as an energy security strategy. But, in most emerging and developing countries, RE is promoted as an economic development strategy. It is not unreasonable to expect that these countries would want to aim to capture as much economic benefit from pursuing RE development as possible. Since localization implies capturing more economic benefit, it

Green Industrial Policy in Comparative Perspective    563

Sub-Saharan Africa 29%

South Asia 4%

East Asia & Pacific 22%

Europe & Central Asia 10%

North America 1% Middle East & North Africa 13% Source: Lewis 2021.

Latin America & Caribbean 21%

Figure 29.2  Geographic distribution of countries with renewable energy (RE) targets in their reported Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) Source: Lewis (2021).

follows that these countries might attempt to pursue some form of localization strategy if domestic capacity allows. This is where green industrial policy comes into play.

Green Industrial Policy for Renewable Energy Development Countries such as China and India that were not part of the group of early wind and solar technology innovators have commonly used different strategies to protect their industries against competition from industry leaders and foster the development of their own industries. However, even countries with established technology industries, including Canada and the United States, still utilize industrial policy to give domestic manufacturers an edge against foreign competition.

Local Content Requirements Even the traditional subsidy policies discussed earlier may include industrial policy elements, such as a national subsidy policy designed to promote local industry growth, such as a FIT or a tender program with a local content requirement (LCR). An LCR is an industrial policy tool that is increasingly being used to support the localization of RE technology manufacturing by mandating the use of a certain portion of locally manufactured components. While not limited to RE technologies, LCRs are increasingly applied to RE policies to encourage the local manufacturing of those RE technologies that are targeted for

564   Joanna I. Lewis domestic policy support. LCRs have also been used to help local industries compete with global RE technology leaders. Policies that encourage domestic manufacturing and technology transfers may create a particular problem with respect to international trade law that explicitly prohibits differential support to domestic over foreign technology, including the World Trade Organization (WTO) (Cottier et al. 2009; Ghiollarnath 2011; Kuntze and Moerenhout 2013; Lewis 2007b; Rubini 2011; Wilke 2011). LCRs also may create an inefficient application of resources, price inflation, and, despite some new job creation, can result in net overall job losses. The reduction of world trade due to LCRs is estimated in one study to be US$93 billion annually (Hufbauer et al. 2013). LCRs are showing up more regularly as part of the RE development strategy of both industrialized and emerging economies (Kuntze and Moerenhout 2013; Oirere 2016; Woods 2014; UNCTAD 2014; Hufbauer et al. 2013). As discussed later, China’s wind power industry is perhaps one of the most notorious and also more successful examples of how LCRs and a broader range of industrial policies supported the development of a globally competitive local manufacturing industry (Lewis 2013). India’s solar industry in many ways attempted to copy the model of China’s wind industry, with its mandated use of domestically manufactured solar photovoltaic (PV) technology and a mandated 30 percent LCR for solar thermal technology (Government of India, Ministry of New and RE 2010). China and India are not alone, however, in their use of LCRs to promote RE industry development. For example, in the wind power sector, several of Spain’s autonomous regional governments have insisted on the local assembly and manufacture of turbines and components before granting development concessions, while Brazil’s PROINFA program aimed to achieve a 60 percent local content rate for wind power technology by making project loans from the Brazilian development bank (BNDES) contingent on turbine manufacturers’ ability to meet this requirement (Lewis 2007a; Ministry of Mines and Energy of Brazil 2010). While LCRs are most commonly used in emerging economies, both Canada and the United States have widely used them to promote RE development at the provincial and state levels. In 2003, wind power tenders issued by the Canadian province of Quebec included mandates for using local content as the Gaspé Peninsula tried to encourage a local wind power industry (Lewis 2013). Ontario Providence took a similar approach several years later when it designed a FIT to promote wind and solar that mandated the use of locally manufactured technology (IESO 2017; Stokes 2013; Yatchew and Baziliauskas 2011). In the United States, several states have incentivized the use of local content, including Massachusetts’s solar incentives favoring locally sourced technology (GTA 2010). The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) also included “Buy American” provisions supporting locally sourced RE (US Department of Energy 2011). A list of countries and states (or other subnational jurisdictions) that have employed the use of LCRs to promote RE technology development is presented in Table 29.2. The actual job creation benefit of LCRs is somewhat unclear. Few studies have successfully been able to evaluate the impact of industrial policies versus deployment policies. For example, while Ontario’s domestic content requirement promised 43,000 new jobs, studies demonstrating the success of the program have been criticized for failing to distinguish between the job creation effect of the Ontarian FIT and the job creation effect of the LCR attached to it (Kuntze and Moerenhout 2013).

Green Industrial Policy in Comparative Perspective    565 Table 29.2 Use of local content requirements (LCRs) in national and subnational

renewable energy (RE) policies Country

RE Sector

Policy Context

LCR Share (year)

Argentina

Wind

For projects in which at least 60% of the materials are sourced locally, tax certificate regimes exist.

[2015] Foreign technology imports are permitted only where no local alternatives exist

Brazil

Wind, solar

Condition for national bank subsidized loans

Wind: 60% (2002, 2012); 65% Solar: Varies by component (2014), ramping up to 60% by 2020

Canada (Ontario)

Wind, solar

Required in order to receive feed-​in tariff

Wind: 25% (2009); 50% (2012). Solar: 50% (2009); 60% (2012)

Canada (Quebec)

Wind

Part of utility tender requirement

40% (2003); 60% (2012)

China

Wind

Initially as part of government resource concession program

20% (1997); 70% (2009)

Croatia

Wind, solar, others

France

Solar

10% bonus on power purchase price

60% (2012)

India

Solar1

Required in order to receive feed-​in tariff; subsidized tender for solar roof installations

30% (2010); Modules 100% made in India (2015)

Indonesia

Solar

All electricity infrastructure; LCR for solar panels is increased to 50% by January 1, 2018, and 60% by January 1, 2019

Stand-​alone off-​grid solar PV system, material min 39.8% Centralized off-​grid solar PV system, material min 37.5% Centralized on-​grid solar PV system, material min 34.1%

Italy

Solar

5–​10 percent bonus on power purchase price

Different rates (2011)

Kenya

Wind, solar, others

Part of local content regulations on the energy sector

2014 (20–​60%)

Jordan

Under discussion for solar

Malaysia

Wind, solar, others

Small bonus on FIT subsidy if use local materials

2011; the bidder must be a local company or consortium with Malaysian equity of at least 51%

Saudi Arabia

Wind, solar

Tender requirement: duty exemption, low land price, favorable loan terms, training, and salary grants

30% (2017); 40–​60% (2018–​2019); 60%+​ (2020 onward)

South Africa

Wind, solar

Tender requirement

[Wind: 35% (2011); targets 60% before 2030] Solar: 45%; Other technologies: 40%; target at 65%

2012

(continued)

566   Joanna I. Lewis Table 29.2 Continued Country

RE Sector

Policy Context

LCR Share (year)

Spain

Wind

Required for market entry at provincial level, and in national feed-​in tariff

Provincial programs in Galicia and Navarra (1994); national 70% (2012)

Turkey

Wind, solar, others

[Part of feed-​in tariff] Tender requirement

[Different rates (2011)] 65% in RE resource areas

Ukraine

Wind, solar, others

2013 (cancelled in 2015)

USA

Wind, solar, others2

2009–​2012 (ARRA), numerous state policies (various years)

Source: Updated and expanded from Lewis 2014 with data from Lewis 2021.

Other Industrial Policies Beyond LCRs, numerous other policies are used to provide preferential treatment to local industries. These include financial or tax incentives to promote local manufacturing, research and development (R&D) support for local firms, and the use of import tariffs or customs duties to support particular industries or encourage domestic manufacturing. Countries that are trying to promote the use of their local domestic RE industries in overseas markets may provide a form of “tied aid” or other export credit assistance to support local firms. Such assistance can help domestic firms compete overseas by providing them favorable financing to back overseas ventures. Tariff-​based barriers may also be used at the border to make it costlier to use imported over domestic goods. This can be achieved by the manipulation of customs duties or other import tariffs to favor domestic goods or promote domestic manufacturing. Countries that are trying to keep overseas firms out of their domestic market also may put in place standards and certification requirements that are unique to their country, creating a barrier to entering their market. China is an example of a country with domestic certification programs that have been criticized as being protectionist. This is an example of a non-​tariff barrier that can favor domestic over foreign firms and can therefore come into conflict with international trade law (Cottier et al. 2009; Ghiollarnath 2011; Kuntze and Moerenhout 2013; Lewis 2007b; Rubini 2011; Wilke 2011). Perhaps the least controversial type of industrial policy is that which helps to boost innovation in domestic firms. For example, R&D support is provided by the state to firms, usually through some sort of competitive process. Such policies can still be seen to create an uneven playing field if domestic firms in one country receive far more state support than firms in another country that are all competing in the same marketplace, but this is generally a more commonly accepted practice since governments usually prioritize domestic firms for domestic R&D funding. An overview of industrial policy instruments that are commonly used to support RE industries and examples of countries where they have been utilized are presented in Table 29.3 along with details on the technology targeted and year(s) implemented, when available. Countries that have included an RE target in their NDC are noted with bold

Green Industrial Policy in Comparative Perspective    567 Table 29.3 Additional industrial policy instruments to support renewable energy

(RE) and countries where utilized Support Measure

Countries Where Utilized

Direct capital subsidy, Argentina; Australia; Austria; Bangladesh; Bosnia/​Herzegovina; Botswana; grant, rebate, or Bulgaria; Canada; Chile; China; Croatia; Cyprus; Czech Republic; Denmark; favorable loan Dominican Republic; Egypt; Finland; France; Germany; Ghana; Greece; Hungary; India; Indonesia; Italy; Japan; Kyrgyzstan; Lesotho; Luxembourg; Malta; Nepal; Netherlands; Nigeria; Norway; Oman; Pakistan; Philippines; Poland; Portugal; Russian Federation; Slovakia; Slovenia; South Korea; Spain; Sri Lanka; Sweden; Switzerland; Tanzania; Turkey; Uganda; United Kingdom; United States; Uruguay; Vietnam; Zambia Export credit assistance

Argentina (RE 2017); Australia (RE 2017, 2018); Brazil (RE 2018); China (multiple years); Cyprus (RE&EE, 2019); Denmark (Wind, various years); Finland (RE, 2019); France (RE, 2018); India (solar, 2020); Japan (RE, 2012, 2013); Mexico (RE, 2019, 2019), Norway (hydropower, 2020); Spain (RE, 2019); South Korea (RE, 2013); UK (RE, 2019); US (RE, multiple years)

Research, development, and demonstration support for domestic companies

Australia (2014); Botswana (1996); Chile (2005); China (Wind, Solar, various years); Denmark (Wind, various years); Germany (Wind, Solar, various years); Estonia (2020); Ethiopia (2002); EU (battery technology, 2019); Finland (bioenergy, 1993); France (2007); Greece (Geothermal, 1984); Italy (2010); Japan (various years); Malaysia (2010); Mexico (2008); Namibia (2014); New Zealand (2014); Nigeria (2005); Russian Federation (2007); Singapore (various years); Switzerland (1977; 2017) United States (Solar, Offshore Wind; 2008, 2011, 2013)

Quality certification to promote domestic technologies

Australia (wind 2013); Belarus (2007); Belgium (biomass 2011), China (solar PV 2013; 2014; Wind 2010; 2014; biodiesel 2017); EU (biofuels 2011); France (hydropower 2009); India (2015); Italy (storage 2015; biofuels, 2011); Paraguay (biofuels 2006); Peru (biofuel, solar 2003); Rwanda (solar 2019); South Korea (2003); UAE, 2013; 2014; USA (small generators 2005); Uruguay (biodiesel 2008); Zambia (biodiesel 2008).

Source: Updated and expanded from Lewis 2014 with data from Lewis 2021. Notes: Countries that have included an RE target in their Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) are noted with bold text. RE =​all or multiple types of renewable energy.

text, highlighting that many of these countries are pursuing industrial policies targeting RE industry development.

Industrial Policy in Action: Wind and Solar Industry Support in China and India To understand how industrial policy is implemented in emerging and developing countries, it is helpful to take a closer look at how specific policies and strategies have been employed and to what end. China and India are particularly salient cases given their roles in global

568   Joanna I. Lewis clean energy development and as major global carbon emitters, making them crucial actors in global environmental governance. Both countries have also employed green industrial policies to incentivize local manufacturing.

Wind in China A late adopter of wind power technology, China has quickly risen to become the largest wind power market in the world, and Chinese firms are now among the leading manufacturers of wind turbine technology globally. By the end of 2019, China had installed 236 gigawatts (GW) of wind power—​more than all the EU countries combined, and more than twice the installed capacity of the United States (REN21 Secretariat 2020). China’s RE development ambition stems from the alignment of this industrial strategy with other key national priorities; namely meeting growing energy demand, reducing air pollution, and developing new high-​tech industries. China has simultaneously pursued the development of a local wind power industry almost from the very beginning of utilizing wind power. A core national innovation strategy in China has targeted the domestic development of technologies even if these technologies were initially based on foreign-​innovated designs. Given this agenda, the Chinese state opted to support the development of wind power technology with a strategy similar to those it employed to support other industries. China’s wind power industry has benefited from various forms of government policy support; some policies have specifically targeted industrial development for the wind power industry, while others have indirectly supported industrial development by establishing a local market for wind power. As policies have changed, companies have often had to quickly change their manufacturing strategies in response (Lewis 2016). Perhaps no country has used industrial policy to promote RE as effectively, and as controversially, as China (Lewis 2014). China’s policies to promote RE have long included mandates and incentives to support the development of domestic technologies and industries. While some elements of these policies, such as LCRs, are unduly protectionist, others are far less controversial, such as R&D support, technology certification and quality control programs, and fiscal or other tax-​related incentives. In periodic science and technology (S&T) plans, as well as its 5-​year plans, the Chinese government has identified several RE industries as strategic national priorities for S&T investment and established a constant and increasing stream of government support for R&D and technology demonstration. Other forms of industry support have been given through more informal channels, such as low-​interest loans or other favorable loan terms given by central and local governments and state-​controlled banks, low-​cost land grants, or expedited permitting (Lewis 2014). While framework policies set the national stage for the promotion of wind energy and pricing policies promoted its deployment, another set of policies were specifically aimed at promoting technology transfer and the localization of wind power technology. One of the first policies that encouraged local manufacturing dates back to 1997. Called the Double Increase Program, it aimed to double the 80 megawatts (MW) of wind capacity that was installed in China at that time while encouraging the use of local content in the future installation of wind turbines. However, at the time, the future outlook for wind power utilization in China was probably too uncertain and 80 MW too small a quantity to encourage local manufacturing by turbine suppliers. Additionally, LCRs conflicted with

Green Industrial Policy in Comparative Perspective    569 the requirement of most foreign government loans, which were being used to support many wind farm ventures in China. These loans were typically in the form of tied-​aid that came from various foreign governments (including Denmark, Germany, and the United States) to support the sales of their own domestic wind farm technology to China. The tied-​aid from foreign governments helped to subsidize the cost of early wind power development in China. About 74 MW of wind power was successfully installed under the Double Increase Program, essentially meeting the program target (Ministry of Science and Technology, State Development Planning Commission, and State Economic and Trade Commission 2002). The 1997 Ride the Wind Program was the first policy to explicitly encourage wind power technology transfer from foreign to domestic firms. Two joint venture enterprises were established to manufacture wind turbines domestically, with the government selecting the firms to participate as opposed to the match being commercially driven. The technology transfers carried out through this program started with a 20 percent LCR, with a goal of increasing this share to 80 percent as learning on the Chinese side progressed (Lew 2000). While earlier guidelines required that all wind farm projects approved by the China National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) during the Ninth 5-​Year Plan (1996–​2000) include wind turbine equipment containing at least 40 percent locally made components, by the 2003 wind concession program, that percentage had increased to first 50 and then 70 percent. Since there were very few Chinese turbine manufacturers at this time, these LCRs mainly affected the foreign wind turbine manufacturers, prompting most of them to establish local manufacturing facilities in China. China’s LCR for wind turbines was further institutionalized in the 2005 NDRC Notice on the Relevant Requirements for the Administration of the Construction of Wind Farms (China National Development and Reform Commission [NDRC] 2005). This Notice clarified that if the localization rate for the project was less than 70 percent, it would not be allowed to be built. While some components were still expected to be imported, the customs administration applied import duties on any wind equipment brought into China from abroad. In addition to explicit technology transfer policies, trade policies have been used in a variety of ways over time to encourage different modes of local manufacturing and industrial development in China. For example, in 2001, the Ministry of Finance and State Administration of Taxation guidelines on the taxation of wind turbine imports stated that wind turbine components for turbines larger than 1.5 MW were exempt from customs duties and from the import sector value-​added tax, while complete wind turbines of less than 3 MW were subject to normal taxation. These guidelines discouraged the import of complete wind turbines and supported local manufacturers needing access to foreign components (Ministry of Finance and State Administration of Taxation 2001). In 2009, US Department of Commerce Secretary Gary Locke traveled to China to ask for the removal of the LCRs, arguing that it was a trade barrier for foreign firms. China ultimately agreed and recalled the requirement in the November 2009 Notice on Abolishing the Localization Rate Requirement for Equipment Procurement in Wind Power Projects. While this was viewed as an achievement for foreign manufacturers, at this point in the development of the industry, the LCR removal had very little impact on the Chinese wind sector. Foreign firms had already established in-​country manufacturing facilities, and Chinese firms had already shut many foreign firms out of the market due to the LCR going beyond just local manufacturing to preferring “local ownership” (Chinese majority ownership) as well.

570   Joanna I. Lewis Consistent policy support specifically targeting Chinese firms has led to the emergence of a Chinese wind technology manufacturing industry primarily built on foreign technology transfers. As China’s wind market has risen to become the largest in the world over the past few years, China’s homegrown wind turbine manufacturers have been able to capture the majority of Chinese market share, increasing competitive tensions between foreign and Chinese firms and even leading to high-​profile trade and intellectual property disputes (Lewis 2013). While China’s LCRs in the wind sector is in many ways a successful example of using protectionism to grow a domestic market, the larger challenge for China has been the development of high-​quality, innovative wind power technology that can compete with the state-​ of-​the-​art wind turbines being made around the world. The tension between the state-​led push for indigenous or independent innovation and the needs of Chinese firms to catch up to global counterparts using international collaborations in innovation has to some extent hurt Chinese firms. In addition, protectionism and barriers to market entry and trade by foreign technology firms are still widespread. This prevents innovation that can happen through international collaborations and indirect knowledge transfers, as well as through competition. To compensate for the lack of international actors in the domestic Chinese renewables technology markets, many Chinese wind firms have developed R&D centers abroad.

Solar in India India has long pursued the development of RE and had made some achievements in technology development, primarily in the wind power industry. Years after its success in the wind industry, the country decided to make its venture into the solar sector, driven by India’s significant solar resources and the suitability of solar technology for India’s need for off-​grid rural electrification and decentralized power in general. The central government initiative promoting solar power in India is the National Solar Mission. Launched in January 2010, the Mission set a target of deploying 20 GW of grid-​connected solar power by 2022. In June 2015, this target was increased to 100 GW by 2022, in part to support India’s climate pledge in the lead-​up to the December 2015 Paris Agreement. By the time India developed the Jawaharlal Nehru National Solar Mission in 2010, the government had closely examined the experiences of other countries in building successful RE industries. China was of particular interest, given its massive success in solar PV technology manufacturing by that time. Also of interest was China’s widespread use of industrial policies, and LCRs in particular, to support its emerging industries as discussed above. The Solar Mission aimed to “promote ecologically sustainable growth while addressing India’s energy security challenge” and also was a core element of the country’s efforts to address climate change (Government of India, Ministry of New and RE 2010). Its objective was to establish India as a global leader in solar energy through a three-​phase approach spanning the 11th to 13th 5-​Year Plans (2012–​2022). Explicit in the first two phases was the establishment of a policy framework that would create an attractive investment environment for companies to invest in research, domestic manufacturing, and project development. As a result, policies not only encouraged the expansion of solar projects, but also aimed to establish a solar manufacturing base in India.

Green Industrial Policy in Comparative Perspective    571 At the time the Solar Mission was launched, however, India had no leading solar PV technology companies and only a modest level of PV module manufacturing capacity (about 700 MW in 2009). In contrast, China had become the largest manufacturer of PV technology as of 2008, and by 2009, had about 4,700 MW of production capacity (CSTEP 2015). India’s technology also lagged behind that of competitors in China, Taiwan, and Malaysia. Indian manufacturing in general was frequently plagued by infrastructure limitations, including access to reliable power and transportation (Hufbauer et al. 2013). This led the government to proactively establish what is referred to as the Special Incentive Package (SIP) policy, which specifically aimed to promote domestic manufacturing plants for silicon and other PV materials along the supply chain. Incentives included zero import duties on capital equipment and an attempt to increase the ease of doing business by removing state-​level obstacles for approvals. Support was also provided for domestic innovation, including for incubation and startup, by providing government-​funded venture support for emerging solar firms along with mentoring and networking resources. In addition, the government established a National Center of Excellence to coordinate solar R&D across the country and invested in human resource development through designing solar engineering courses and fellowship programs at Indian universities. To promote solar expansion in India, the Solar India directive developed auctions for power purchase agreements (PPAs) to solar developers at a premium over the cost of coal electricity. However, any projects that obtained one of these subsidized PPAs were required to use PV cells and modules manufactured in India. While no specific LCR percentage was given initially, the directive also stated that all bidding documents for solar projects must ensure local content is maximized and also that technology transfer is required for any government and private procurement from foreign sources (Government of India, Ministry of New and Renewable Energy 2010). Unlike in China, such technology transfer mandates were historically less common in India. However, since the launch of Solar India, LCRs are increasingly prevalent in India, particularly as the country looks to expand its energy technology exports abroad. India is also increasingly a purveyor of tied aid, in which it provides development assistance or low-​interest loans to developing countries as long as they agree to purchase RE technology from Indian firms (GTA 2017). An interesting design feature of the Solar Mission directive was that it made an exception to the LCR for developers using thin-​film PV technology. Since thin-​film technology was not yet available in India and was generally more advanced and of higher efficiency, the government noted that it could be imported from outside of India. However, this exception created an unintentional market distortion. While thin film is a relatively small share of PV development globally, the 2012 Indian solar auctions resulted in 70 percent of the subsidies going to developers using imported thin film technology (Hufbauer et al. 2013). In this case, the LCR resulted in developers skirting the requirement by importing more expensive technology, and the impact on domestic manufacturing capacity was minimal. One likely reason that the Indian government instituted an LCR in the solar sector was to compete with other countries using industrial policy to support their solar industries. For example, the United States was supporting its leading solar company, First Solar, through low-​interest loans provided by the US Export-​Import (Ex-​Im) Bank. US development banks also noticed the Indian solar loophole; the US Ex-​Im Bank and the Overseas

572   Joanna I. Lewis Private Investment Corporation (OPIC) offered low-​interest loans to Indian solar project developers with a mandatory condition that they buy the solar equipment from US companies, and Indian observers have argued that this unfairly distorted the Indian market (Centre for Science and Environment 2012).2 The Indian Parliament’s Standing Committee on Energy released an appraisal of the Solar Mission in July 2017. The study found that while Indian solar manufacturing capacity hadincreased since the program began to around 3 GW for cells and 7 GW for modules, much of the capacity was going unused, despite it not being able to handle the annual demand of the country. The appraisal noted that China was still by far the leader in solar manufacturing, with China plus Taiwan comprising 85 percent of total global PV cell and module manufacturing capacity in 2016. It noted that the cost of solar manufacturing in China was less than a third that of manufacturing in India. The per watt cost of wafer to cell conversion in India was reported to be around 16–​18 US cents compared to around 6 US cents in China; the per watt cost of cell to module conversion was somewhat more competitive, estimated to be 12 cents in China versus 13–​14 cents in India (Standing Committee on Energy 2017). Perhaps most telling is the appraisal’s review of the LCR. It found that in Phase I of the program, both batches of grid-​connected solar projects utilized entirely imported thin-​film PV technology in order to skirt the LCR (about 140 MW in total). And during Phase II, when the government removed that exemption, many projects that were approved were never completed and several were canceled after the WTO ruling in 2016 that India’s LCR violated WTO rules (Ola 2016; WTO 2017).3 In a major blow to India’s solar mission, India officially agreed to remove its LCR by the end of 2017 (Kenning 2017). Yet, despite the WTO ruling, India still tried to encourage the use of local technology in a subsequent round of solar projects totaling 7.5 GW. The government intended to try to skirt WTO requirements by holding a competitive auction process while making sure domestic firms were awarded the contracts (Clover 2017b). India also fought back against Chinese, Taiwanese, and Malaysian solar manufacturers, claiming a causal link between dumping activities by firms in these countries and injuries sustained by Indian solar companies (Clover 2017a). This followed a petition filed by the Indian Solar Manufacturers Association calling for the government to act against unfair importation of solar panel technology from these countries. The Indian government’s attempt to rely on LCRs to boost the development of its domestic solar industry were ultimately ineffective due to the combination of the initial policy loopholes and the WTO decision. India still has only a nascent solar manufacturing industry (about 1 percent of global module production compared with China’s dominant 71 percent), however India’s solar development appears to finally be taking off. Falling solar costs and a government push for large solar tenders has resulted in rapid growth in installed solar capacity. A recent IEA report describes India as being “on the cusp of a solar-​powered revolution” and projects that solar power will overtake coal power as soon as this decade (IEA 2021). This growth in domestic solar development has led once again to calls for India to “think like China” to encourage domestic manufacturing of solar equipment (Khetan 2021), and the Minister of Power has implemented several new industrial policies, including import duties and taxes on solar cells and modules, in a renewed attempt to encourage local solar manufacturing (Reuters, 2020).

Green Industrial Policy in Comparative Perspective    573

Conclusion and Policy Recommendations Given the controversy surrounding industrial policy employed in two of the largest emerging economies to support the establishment of RE industries, it is important to consider the policy options for the next generation of countries looking to establish RE markets of their own. Just as India looked to China to emulate its wind and solar industry development, other developing countries may look to China and India. Even industrialized countries such as Canada and the United States have used industrial policies, including LCRs, as a way to jump-​start local manufacturing and capture local economic benefits in an increasingly competitive global market. But given the potentially adverse impact of such policies on overall global deployment trends, they are not to be deployed without caution. The use of industrial policy to support green industries has important implications for determining domestic capabilities in RE industry development as well as influencing international trade in RE technologies. The evolution of these dynamics will influence both the development and the deployment of low-​carbon technologies and, consequently, our ability to achieve long-​term climate goals. Countries may want to examine alternative strategies to reap local economic benefits from RE deployment. First, a robust installation, service, and support industry can help local economies capture much of the value associated with RE projects, even if they are relying on imported technology (Smith and Margolis 2019). Second, firms located in countries targeting local RE industry development may want to explore strategic technology partnerships with firms in leading RE markets, including joint ventures, to capture some of the local benefit of using foreign-​sourced technology and to help encourage technology transfer. Third, countries can consider how to use nonprotectionist industrial policies—​ policies that encourage localization of green technologies while still fostering competition in the marketplace. These measures include measures such as tax incentives that can be utilized by any firm setting up a local manufacturing facility, not just locally owned firms. Ultimately, a rapid transition to a low-​or zero-​carbon technology future is needed if we are to avoid the worst impacts of climate change. Green industrial policy helps states justify this green transition while also potentially making that transition costlier and more inefficient. As a result, we must pay closer attention to how green industrial policy is being implemented and continue to engage in global conversations about how to best foster clean energy innovation, rapid technology deployment, and economic development, with a shared vision that does not leave emerging and developing countries behind.

Notes 1. See, for example, Biden’s Plan for Climate Change and Environmental Justice (Biden for President 2020). 2. In 2010 and 2011, the US government reportedly provided $248.3 million of fast state financing (part of the climate finance package negotiated by the State Department in Copenhagen under the UNFCCC) to grid-​connected solar plants in India (Centre for Science and Environment 2012).

574   Joanna I. Lewis 3. In 2014, the US government, under pressure from its own domestic solar manufacturers, filed a complaint against India’s DCRs with the WTO, and, in 2016, the WTO ruled against India. In 2016, India initiated its own dispute with the United States domestic content requirements and subsidies for the RE sector in eight US states; China has initiated a similar dispute.

References Biden for President. “Plan for Climate Change and Environmental Justice.” Joe Biden for President: Official Campaign Website. July 14, 2020. https://​joebi​den.com/​clim​ate-​plan/​. Centre for Science and Environment. “The US Is Using Climate Finance to Kill the Indian Solar Panel Industry.” August 17, 2012. http://​www.csein​dia.org/​cont​ent/​us-​using-​clim​ate-​ fina​nce-​kill-​ind​ian-​solar-​panel-​indus​try-​cse. China National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC). “Notice from the National Development and Reform Commission on the Relevant Requirements for the Administration of the Construction of Wind Farms (No. 1204).” July 4, 2005. http://​docume​ nts.nyti​mes.com/​chi​nas-​requi​reme​nts-​for-​wind-​farms?ref=​glo​bal. Clover, Ian. “India Launches AD Probe against Chinese, Taiwanese and Malaysian Solar Cells.” PV Magazine International. July 25, 2017a. https://​www.pv-​magaz​ine.com/​2017/​07/​ 25/​india-​launc​hes-​ad-​probe-​agai​nst-​chin​ese-​taiwan​ese-​and-​malays​ian-​solar-​cells/​. Clover, Ian. “India Energy Ministry Plans 7.5 GW Support Program for Domestic Solar Manufacturing.” PV Magazine International. August 7, 2017b. https://​www.pv-​magaz​ine. com/​2017/​08/​07/​india-​ene​rgy-​minis​try-​plans-​7-​5-​g w-​supp​ort-​prog​ram-​for-​domes​tic-​ solar-​manufa​ctur​ing/​. Cottier, Thomas, Garba Malumfashi, Sofya Matteotti-​Berkutova, Olga Nartova, Joelle De Sepibus, and Sadeq Z. Bigdeli. “Energy in WTO Law and Policy.” NCCR Trade Working Papers. Geneva, SWZ: NCCR Trade Regulation, 2009. CSTEP. “How Did China Become the Largest Solar PV Manufacturing Country?” CSTEP-​ Note-​2015-​02. Karnataka, IND: Center for Study of Science, Technology and Policy, 2015. http://​w ww.cstep.in/​uplo​ads/​defa​ult/​f iles/​publi​cati​ons/​stuff/​CSTEP_​S ​olar​_​PV_​Work​ ing_​Seri​es_​2​015.pdf. Deringer, Hanna, Fredrik Erixon, Phillip Lamprecht, and Erik van der Marel. “The Economic Impact of Local Content Requirements: A Case Study of Heavy Vehicles.” European Centre for International Political Economy. 2018. https://​ecipe.org/​publi​cati​ons/​the-​econo​mic-​ imp​act-​of-​local-​cont​ent-​requi​reme​nts/​. Ghiollarnath, Carol Ni. RE Tax Incentives and WTO Law: Irreconcilably Incompatible? An Examination of the WTO-​Consistency of Direct Corporate Tax Incentives for the Development of RE. Doctoral Dissertation, Maastricht, Netherlands: Maastricht University, 2011. Government of India, Ministry of New and Renewable Energy. “Jawaharlal Nehru National Solar Mission: Building Solar India.” October 2010. https://​digi​tal.libr​ary.unt.edu/​ark:/​ 67531/​meta​dc29​365/​m2/​1/​hig​h_​re​s_​d/​Indi​a_​so​lar_​miss​ion.pdf. GTA. “United States of America/​State of Massachusetts: Higher Incentives for Solar Projects Containing Components Made by Massachusetts Companies.” January 1, 2010. http://​www. globa​ltra​deal​ert.org/​state-​act/​11825. GTA. “Global Trade Alert Database.” 2017. http://​www.globa​ltra​deal​ert.org/​.

Green Industrial Policy in Comparative Perspective    575 Hochstetler, Kathryn, and Genia Kostka. “Wind and Solar Power in Brazil and China: Interests, State–​Business Relations, and Policy Outcomes.” Global Environmental Politics 15, no. 3 (2015): 74–​94. https://​doi.org/​10.1162/​GLEP_​a_​00​312. Hufbauer, Gary Clyde, Jeffrey J. Schott, and Cathleen Cimino-​ Isaacs. Local Content Requirements: A Global Problem. New York: Columbia University Press, 2013. IEA. India’s Energy Outlook 2021. Paris: International Energy Agency, 2021. https://​www.iea. org/​repo​rts/​india-​ene​rgy-​outl​ook-​2021. IESO. “Feed-​in Tariff Program.” Independent Electricity System Operator of Ontario. 2017. http://​fit.pow​erau​thor​ity.on.ca/​prog​ram-​resour​ces/​faqs/​domes​tic-​cont​ent. IRENA. “RE in National Climate Action.” 2018. http://​publi​cati​ons/​2018/​Dec/​Renewa​ble-​Ene​ rgy-​in-​Natio​nal-​Clim​ate-​Act​ion. Kenning, Tom. “US and India Agree December Date to Shut Down India’s Local Content Solar Policy.” PV Tech. June 27, 2017. https://​www.pv-​tech.org/​news/​us-​and-​india-​agree-​ decem​ber-​date-​to-​shut-​down-​ind​ias-​local-​cont​ent-​solar-​po. Khetan, Ashish. “To break free from Beijing’s chokehold on solar manufacturing, India should act like China.” Scroll.in. May 25, 2021. https://​scr​oll.in/​arti​cle/​995​583/​to-​break-​free-​from-​ beiji​ngs-​chokeh​old-​on-​solar-​manufa​ctur​ing-​india-​sho​uld-​act-​like-​china. Kuntze, Jan-​Christoph, and Tom Moerenhout. “Local Content Requirements and the RE Industry: A Good Match?” ICTSD. 2013. https://​unc​tad.org/​sys​tem/​files/​non-​offic​ial-​ docum​ent/​DITC_​T​ED_​1​3062​013_​Stud​y_​IC​TSD.pdf. Lew, Debra J. “Alternatives to Coal and Candles: Wind Power in China.” Energy Policy 28, no. 4 (2000): 271–​286. http://​dx.doi.org/​10.1016/​S0301-​4215(99)00077-​4. Lewis, Joanna I. “A Comparison of Wind Power Industry Development Strategies in Spain, India and China.” Prepared by the Center for Resource Solutions for the Energy Foundation’s China Sustainable Energy Program, 2007a. Lewis, Joanna I. “A Review of the Potential International Trade Implications of Key Wind Power Industry Policies in China.” Beijing: Energy Foundation China Sustainable Energy Program, 2007b. Lewis, Joanna I. Green Innovation in China: China’s Wind Power Industry and the Global Transition to a Low-​Carbon Economy. New York: Columbia University Press, 2013. Lewis, Joanna I. “The Rise of RE Protectionism: Emerging Trade Conflicts and Implications for Low Carbon Development.” Global Environmental Politics 14, no. 4 (2014): 10–​35. Lewis, Joanna I. “The Development of China’s Wind Power Technology Sector: Characterizing National Policy Support, Technology Acquisition and Technological Learning.” In China As an Innovation Nation, edited by Yu Zhou, William Lazonick, and Yifei Sun, 283–​305. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016. Lewis, Joanna. “Renewable Energy Support Measures and Industrial Policies Database.” Mendeley Data 1, 2021. https://​doi.org/​10.17632/​pnj​4fk9​fct.1. Lewis, Joanna I., and Ryan H. Wiser. “Fostering a RE Technology Industry: An International Comparison of Wind Industry Policy Support Mechanisms.” Energy Policy 35, no. 3 (2007): 1844–​1857. https://​doi.org/​10.1016/​j.enpol.2006.06.005. Ministry of Finance and State Administration of Taxation. Notice Regarding Policy Issues for Comprehensive Utilization of Some Natural Resources and Other Goods No. 198, 2001.Beijing: Ministry of Finance and State Administration of Taxation of the People’s Republic of China.

576   Joanna I. Lewis Ministry of Mines and Energy of Brazil. “Programa de Incentivo Às Fontes Alternativas de Energia Elétrica (PROINFA) (Program of Incentives for Alternative Electricity Sources).” 2010. http://​www.mme.gov.br/​progra​mas/​proi​nfa/​. Ministry of Science and Technology, State Development Planning Commission, and State Economic and Trade Commission. “Evaluation of Policies Designed to Promote the Commercialization of Wind Power Technology in China.” Energy Foundation China Sustainable Energy Program, 2002. https://​www.efch​ina.org/​Repo​rts-​en/​repo​rts-​efch​ina-​ 20020​902-​zh. Oirere, Shem. “Challenge of Local Content in RE Projects in Africa.” RE World. August 30, 2016. http://​www.renew​able​ener​gywo​rld.com/​artic​les/​2016/​08/​challe​nge-​of-​local-​cont​ent-​ in-​renewa​ble-​ene​rgy-​proje​cts-​in-​afr​ica.html. Ola, Danielle. “US Wins WTO Trade Case against India.” PV Tech. September 19, 2016. https://​ www.pv-​tech.org/​news/​us-​wins-​wto-​trade-​case-​agai​nst-​india. REN21 Secretariat. “Renewables 2020 Global Status Report.” REN21 (blog). 2020. https://​www. ren21.net/​repo​rts/​glo​bal-​sta​tus-​rep​ort/​. Reuters. “India to replace coal fired power plants with renewbales-​minister.” October 6, 2020. https://​www.reut​ers.com/​arti​cle/​india-​power-​idUSKB​N26R​2EC. Rubini, Luca. “The Subsidization of RE in the WTO: Issues and Perspectives.” Working Paper No 2011/​32. NCCR Trade Working Papers. Swiss National Centre of Competence in Research, 2011. Smith, Brittany L., and Robert Margolis. “Expanding the Photovoltaic Supply Chain in the United States: Opportunities and Challenges.” NREL/​ TP-​ 6A20-​ 73363. Golden, CO: NREL, 2019. Standing Committee on Energy. “National Solar Mission-​An Appraisal.” 2017. http://​www.ind​ iaen​viro​nmen​tpor​tal.org.in/​files/​file/​natio​nal%20so​lar%20miss​ion%20-​%20an%20ap​prai​ sal.pdf. Stokes, Leah C. “The Politics of RE Policies: The Case of Feed-​in Tariffs in Ontario, Canada.” Energy Policy 56 (May 2013): 490–​500. https://​doi.org/​10.1016/​j.enpol.2013.01.009. UNCTAD. “Local Content Requirements and The Green Economy.” United Nations. 2014. https://​unc​tad.org/​en/​Publ​icat​ions​Libr​ary/​ditct​ed20​13d7​_​en.pdf. UNFCCC Secretariat. “NDC Registry.” 2020. https://​www4.unf​ccc.int/​sites/​NDC​Stag​ing/​ Pages/​Home.aspx. US Department of Energy. “Legacy Guidance: The Buy American Provision of the Recovery Act.” 2011. https://​ene​rgy.gov/​eere/​fund​ing/​leg​acy-​guida​nce-​buy-​ameri​can-​provis​ion-​ recov​ery-​act. Wilke, Marie. “Feed-​in Tariffs for Renewable Energy and WTO Subsidy Rules: An Initial Legal Review.” Geneva, Switzerland: ICTSD International Centre for Trade and Sustainable Development, 2011. https://​www.files.ethz.ch/​isn/​139​118/​fit​s_​wi​lke.pdf. Woods, Lucy. “Brazil Confirms Details of PV Local Content Rules.” PV Tech. August 13, 2014. https://​www.pv-​tech.org/​news/​brazil_​development_​bank_​releases_​criteria_​f​or_​d​omes​ tic_​cont​ent_​fund​ing. WTO. “DS456: India: Certain Measures Relating to Solar Cells and Solar Modules.” 2017. https://​www.wto.org/​engl​ish/​trato​p_​e/​disp​u_​e/​case​s_​e/​ds45​6_​e.htm. Yatchew, Adonis, and Andy Baziliauskas. “Ontario Feed-​in-​Tariff Programs.” Energy Policy 39, no. 7 (2011): 3885–​3893. https://​doi.org/​10.1016/​j.enpol.2011.01.033.

Chapter 30

Natu ral Re s ou rc e s and the P ol i t i c s of Distribu t i on Mohannad Al-​S uwaidan and Nimah Mazaheri Introduction Despite the hope for prosperity that accompanies the discovery of natural resources like oil or precious metals, these resources effectively hold no value for the vast majority of the population until they are extracted, sold, and the revenues collected and distributed by a government. Consequently, a government’s distributive policies—​who receives a share of the resource revenues, how much, and in what way—​carry enormous consequences for a nation. Distributive policies help to determine if the resources will propel the economy forward and lift millions out of poverty or if they will lead to stalled development, corruption, and inequality. Distributive policies help to shape the political fortunes of governments. They can entrench leaders, bring new ones to power, or spark unrest and secessionist demands. Distributive policies also carry significant consequences for the environment. The conversion of natural resource wealth into distributive benefits for citizens is often what justifies aggressive, resource-​led development strategies. Yet the extraction of natural resources unavoidably destroys the surrounding environment by harming ecological systems and biodiversity. Citizens living in resource-​producing environments are more likely to experience toxic pollution, poor quality soil, and less access to clean water. In countries both rich and poor, the environmental threats that result from resource extraction have spurred political mobilization to shut down resource sectors. In spite of grand hopes for greater distribution funded by resource wealth, many communities conclude that this does not offset the devastatingly negative environmental effects of unrestrained resource extraction. In the literature on natural resources, distributive policies are featured prominently in two of the most widely referenced theories: the “resource curse” and “rentier state” theories.1 One popular version of the resource curse theory argues that abundant resources lead to

578    Mohannad Al-Suwaidan and Nimah Mazaheri underdevelopment because leaders plunder the revenue windfall and make bad decisions about distribution. Instead of channeling the revenues into productive areas of the economy and society, leaders ferry rents to elites, erect a bloated and inefficient public sector, and ply the public with fiscally unsustainable benefits. The rentier state theory argues that this method of distribution fosters a society of individual rentiers and becomes an inescapable cycle. As people become dependent on the government’s largesse, they come to expect a steady stream of generous subsidies and easily accessible government jobs. In return, they reward the government for its generosity and become politically complacent, even in the face of illegitimate, undemocratic rule (Karl 1997). Or so we have thought. In reality, resource-​rich countries vary considerably in the extent to which governments have control over their natural resources, which affects their level of access to rents and the manner in which benefits are distributed to the population. Countries with state-​owned resource sectors adopt different policies and go down different development paths compared to countries with privately owned resource sectors (Jones Luong and Weinthal 2010). Furthermore, there are many different ways in which distribution of resource rents can take place. While many increase their overall social spending, some decide to give universal subsidies on essentials like fuel or channel the revenues into universal safety nets like cash-​based dividend funds. But there is only a superficial understanding about why the types of distribution vary among resource-​rich countries that otherwise appear to be similar on many levels. Finally, recent scholarship has challenged many of our assumptions about how political forces shape the government’s decisions about distribution. Although there are countries that we routinely think of as “classic rentier states,” others break with this model. This chapter begins by outlining the main options for distribution in resource-​rich countries. It then discusses the general approaches to distribution and focuses on policies that involve “direct distribution.” Today, many academics and members of the international lending community consider methods of direct distribution—​such as cash-​based safety nets—​to be one of the best tools in the fight against the potentially harmful effects of resource wealth (Rodríguez, Morales, and Monaldi Marturet 2013; Devarajan et al. 2013; Gupta, Segura-​ Ubiergo, and Flores 2014; Salehi-​Isfahani and Mostafavi-​Dehzooei 2018; Berman 2018). Many in the humanitarian sector also embrace cash-​based distribution as a tool to help populations affected by conflict, climate shocks, and other emergencies (Heaslip, Kovács, and Haavisto 2018; Mary and Mishra 2020). The chapter continues by examining the political forces that shape distributive policies, starting from the “supply-​side” forces that emerge from the government and leaders. It then considers the “demand-​side” forces from citizens and social groups. The chapter concludes by discussing how new research can help motivate better recommendations about the distributive options for resource-​rich countries.

Distributive Policy: An Array of Findings and Options The governments of resource-​rich countries have long relied on distributive policies to satisfy the basic needs of the population and direct the resource windfall toward a broader

Natural Resources and the Politics of Distribution    579 transformation of the economy and society. Before moving ahead, it is important to clarify that this chapter is centered on policies of distribution, not redistribution. Policies of distribution involve wealth being transferred directly to the population from the natural resource revenue, not between segments of the population. By contrast, policies of redistribution involve the extraction of wealth from one segment of the population—​typically via taxation—​and then transferring those revenues to another segment. Distributional policies do not require this first step of extraction from the population because the revenues are transferred directly by the government. To be sure, distributional policy choices are not unique to resource-​rich countries.2 The rentier state theory predicts that resource-​rich countries will embark on ambitious plans for distribution and that there is a shrewd political goal in mind. Namely, distribution is used to “buy off ” citizens so that leaders can exercise unchecked rule. Distribution tends to arrive in the form of increased government spending on education, health, social welfare, and basic household goods. In the 1800s, copper booms in Chile paid for the distribution of new public goods (Saylor 2014). After discovering oil in the 1930s, Kuwait spent generously on healthcare, education, and social welfare (Crystal 1990). Staring with the oil booms of the 1970s, Saudi Arabia and other oil-​producing Gulf states provided citizens with fuel, electricity, and water subsidies (Chaudhry 1997). In 2008, Bolivia directed its natural gas revenues to fund a universal old-​age pension program. There are many examples of resource wealth spurring increases in government spending, and particularly so among the high percentage of countries that end up nationalizing their resource sectors. Many resource-​rich countries also use public-​sector employment as a way to distribute the revenue windfall. In oil-​rich places like the United Arab Emirates, more than 80 percent of citizens hold a government job (Herb 2014, p. 21). Although a number of countries closely adhere to the rentier state model of abundant resource wealth coupled with generous distribution, statistical research is more uncertain about a link. In fact, more than one study finds that natural resources tend to undermine education spending (Gylfason 2001; Cockx and Francken 2016; Barber and Mazaheri 2019). A study of Middle East and North African states observes that natural resources are negatively associated with public health spending (Cockx and Francken 2015). Another study examines autocracies and finds that oil wealth is associated with less social spending overall, particularly in education and health (Hong 2017). Some of the country-​specific or subnational research is more optimistic. A positive link between natural resources and public spending is observed in US states (Goldberg, Wibbels, and Mvukiyehe 2008), Indonesian provinces (Dettman and Pepinsky 2014), and Brazilian municipalities (Caselli and Michaels 2013). But there are negative or null findings, too. A study of Indonesian villages concludes that natural resource shocks have negative or no effects on electrification and healthcare. In Iran, patterns in government spending were unaffected by oil price booms and busts from 1959 to 2007 (Farzanegan 2011). One common characteristic with many (but not all) of these studies is that they use government spending data to provide insights about distribution. The spending measures are often aggregated to include various types of services, from healthcare to education to social welfare. However, different public services will be prioritized differently by governments, which renders an aggregate measure uninformative. Also, spending data are unlikely to be accurate indicators of the extent to which citizens benefit from a particular service (Mazaheri 2017; Fails 2019).3 In many resource-​rich places, social spending is off-​budget or

580    Mohannad Al-Suwaidan and Nimah Mazaheri channeled through state-​owned companies (Luciani 1994; Ross 2009),4 which will underestimate the true extent of service provision. In addition, many studies show that resource wealth invites more corruption (Caselli and Michaels 2013; Karl 2004; Vicente 2010), which can mean that spending earmarked for services fails to reach the targeted population. In this case, spending data will overestimate the true extent of service provision. Consider what was found in Brazil: in spite of higher spending in the oil-​rich municipalities, surveys and administrative records discovered that households benefited far less than expected, most likely because of corruption and diversion of funds by local politicians (Caselli and Michaels 2013). Beyond the problematic aspects of relying on spending data to guide insights about distribution, it may be more beneficial to focus on policies of “direct distribution.”5 Direct distribution policies have attracted serious attention in recent years as a helpful tool in the fight against the pitfalls of government distribution of natural resource wealth. In general, there are four different types of direct distribution that resource-​rich places have attempted: (1) safety nets, (2) consumption-​promoting distribution, (3) progressive distribution, and (4) targeted subsidies. Safety nets are universal and involve cash distribution. Consumption-​promoting policies are also universal, but they are non-​cash-​based. They involve distributing the resource revenues by lowering the cost of essential goods like fuel, electricity, water, or food. Progressive distributive policies are targeted and generally cash-​based. They typically have distributional goals that are horizontal or vertical. Targeted subsidies are cash-​or non–​cash-​based and are intended to cut costs for business owners or reduce household expenditures for specific subgroups of the population, like the poor. Both safety nets and consumption-​promoting distribution are, in theory, universal types of distribution. Safety nets are cash payments given to citizens or residents as a way to share the benefits of the resource wealth. In oil-​rich countries, this policy is commonly referred to as “oil-​to-​cash” or “resources-​to-​cash” (Moss et al. 2015; Birdsall and Subramanian 2004). The Alaska Permanent Fund in the US is an example. Established in 1976, the fund provides an annual check to all Alaskan residents (typically in the amount of $1,000–​1,500 in recent years) which is funded by oil sales. Another example is the case of Mongolia. In 2006, the country’s copper boom spurred a cash transfer program for all children, which was extended to all citizens in 2010–​2012 (Yeung and Howes 2015; Namkhaijantsan and Mihalyi 2020). Consumption-​promoting distribution is likewise universal but tends to be non–​cash-​ based. It involves distributing resource wealth by lowering the cost of necessary goods. But the catch is that an individual needs to consume the good in order to benefit. In the case of fuel subsidies, many of the world’s major oil producers spend billions of dollars to maintain these policies, even though they are demonstrably regressive and come at a steep fiscal price tag (Cheon, Urpelainen, and Lackner 2013). Furthermore, fuel subsidies have a negative impact on a country’s environmental quality as the subsidized fuel leads to overconsumption. Progressive distribution and targeted subsidies are not universal types of distribution. Progressive distribution can come in the form of conditional cash transfers or income-​ based distribution. They are generally seeking to address inequalities and are usually given to low-​income households. For instance, oil-​rich Mexico adopted the conditional cash program Progresa in 1997 (later named Oportunidades) to address poverty using cash payments to families. Eligibility is based on geographic and socioeconomic factors, and families are

Natural Resources and the Politics of Distribution    581 required to send their children to school and get preventative health check-​ups to receive the payments. Targeted subsidies are cash or non-​ cash benefits and come in the form of price reductions for goods consumed by certain segments of the population or inputs needed for businesses. Since the 1960s, resource-​rich Malaysia has provided targeted subsidies to individuals working at every point of the rice and paddy value chain, rendering it the country’s most protected industry (World Bank Group 2019). The coal-​rich Indian state of Bihar gave out similar subsidies during the 1990s. The subsidies were directed toward agriculture-​producing members of lower-​caste groups—​who were strong supporters of the state government—​while few subsidies were given to the upper-​caste–​controlled mining sector (Kale and Mazaheri 2014). To date, most resource-​rich countries have tried at least one type of direct distribution. A small number have tried cash-​based distribution, and, in most cases, the program imposes conditionality. Consumption-​promoting policies are very common, particularly fuel subsidies in oil-​rich countries where it is (incorrectly) assumed by citizens that the government can easily and inexpensively provide gasoline. The most widespread type of direct distribution is targeted subsidies. But these are also the most problematic as they are easily influenced by political favoritism and spur a pattern of rent-​seeking and entitlement that is difficult to escape. Next, the chapter explores how political factors shape a country’s decisions about distributive policies, centering on the forces that emerge from within the government or leadership.

State Capacity and Distributive Policy Choice Why is there such variation in the distributive policies of resource-​rich countries? The role of “state capacity” is often pointed to as a determining factor. Here, we are using the term to refer to the ability of a government to marshal administrative and informational capacity to implement its policies. In the context of distribution, a government’s administrative capacity refers to its ability to manage and operate the networks of delivery of goods and services to the population. This is also discussed as “bureaucratic quality” in the literature. “Informational capacity” refers to the government’s ability to continually collect, verify, and monitor information on individuals. Different distributive policies demand different types of administrative and informational capacities. Cash-​based types of distribution require a high level of administrative capacity in order to ensure proper delivery of payments. For conditional cash transfers, a high level of informational capacity is needed to determine eligibility (Zucco 2013). Yet many types of non-​cash or indirect distribution can be enacted with the stroke of a pen or require more effort from the recipient than the government (consuming the good, submitting paperwork, etc.). Thus, they are feasible with lower levels of state capacity. Research finds that state capacity is a key factor in determining whether or not a country adopts consumption-​promoting policies like fuel subsidies. Major oil producers and countries with weaker institutions are in fact much more likely to provide fuel subsidies. This is

582    Mohannad Al-Suwaidan and Nimah Mazaheri explained as an “administratively more convenient policy instrument” (Cheon et al. 2013, p. 384; Victor 2009; Fattouh and El-​Katiri 2013). But the informational component of state capacity is important here, too. Even if a government would prefer giving targeted subsidies for fiscal or political reasons, it may be difficult to do so if the government’s informational capacity is low. Thus, leaders rely on consumption subsidies, which sends the message to the people: “If you want to benefit from the resource wealth, come and get it yourself.” On the administrative side, the advent of electronic transfers has reduced some of the government’s costs to implement universal or targeted cash-​based distribution but this does not solve all capacity deficits (Moss et al. 2015). Targeted payments that require decentralized delivery and close monitoring of local bureaucrats are still administratively difficult, and they may only create more corruption in countries with low state capacity (Kyle 2018). Will countries with governments that have better administrative and informational capacities avoid universal subsidies and instead choose targeted distribution programs simply because they can? Scholars have yet to tackle this question, but the answer is expected to be “no.”6 The writings on rentier states suggest that a path-​dependent process unfolds whereby the distributive policies that are first adopted after receiving a resource windfall become “locked-​in.” Indeed, changing the distributive policies may require new types of administrative and informational capacities that are both financially and politically costly to create. Given that citizens and rent-​seeking elites come to expect certain benefits once they begin receiving them, radical distributive reforms are then akin to political suicide for leaders (Victor 2009; Lockwood 2015). As we might expect, countries that are dependent on resource rents have often held on to methods of distribution that have proven to be inefficient, fiscally expensive, and an underutilization of the government’s true state capacity. However, institutional lock-​ in can be overcome. A number of oil-​ rich countries changed their distributive policies in recent years, particularly those relating to consumption subsidies. Interestingly, this was done in the 2010s, after eschewing the same kinds of reforms during the fiscally lean era of low oil prices during the 1990s. In many places, reforms were made possible because they were coupled with a new compensatory program. For instance, Iran cut fuel subsidies in the early 2010s, but it did so while introducing social security reforms and a new large-​scale cash transfer program. Saudi Arabia adopted fuel subsidy reforms in 2016, but the blow was softened with a $250 cash compensation per family (Krane 2018). Indonesia also cut its fuel subsidies in the 2000s, but it did so while offering a targeted subsidy program (Kyle 2018). Beyond offering a replacement benefit, a number of other factors helped to provide the “political cover” for fuel subsidy reforms: low global oil prices, overconsumption, regional political instability, and the threat of climate change (Krane 2018). Today, some of the most oil-​rich Gulf countries are reducing fuel subsidies and investing in renewable energy sectors for domestic consumption and for export, serving as a new source of rent for incumbent elites (Rabinowitz 2020). This notion of “political cover” seems important given that citizens do not like losing a benefit they have grown accustomed to and feel that they rightfully deserve. When leaders perceive their authority to be tenuous, distributive reforms may be politically risky and only a unique set of circumstances can make them possible. When leaders perceive their authority to be more secure, distributive reforms may be more straightforward and perhaps even undertaken without a compensatory program. In this sense, although the role of state capacity is a necessary determinant in establishing which distributive policies are feasible,

Natural Resources and the Politics of Distribution    583 state capacity alone cannot explain which distributive policies are adopted. State capacity can explain the feasibility of reform, but not whether it is actually pursued. To answer this puzzle, we need to look more closely at domestic politics and how social forces shape distributive policies.

Domestic Politics and Social Pressures on Distributive Policies The rentier state theory holds that the revenues from resource wealth pay for generous distribution that fundamentally alters government–​society relations. Distribution grants leaders more autonomy from social groups and fosters a population dependent on the state. As a result, citizens are assumed to become depoliticized and weak. But while it is often true that resource wealth empowers leaders at the expense of society, there is little evidence that society withers away in resource-​rich countries. Citizens are not eternally submissive just because the government buys them off with distribution. The upheavals in Algeria, Bahrain, Libya, and Tunisia in the 2010s and the 2019–​2020 Iranian protests were all vivid examples of anti-​state mobilization emerging in a resource-​rich context. Domestic politics and social forces influence the types of distributive policies that are adopted in resource-​rich countries. Given the central role that distribution plays in the average citizen’s quality of life, when the government of a resource-​rich country is widely perceived to fail at this, its legitimacy is called into question (Marcel and Mitchell 2006). In places where the government has ownership and control over the resources, citizens tend to have higher expectations about distribution (Jones Luong and Weinthal 2010). Resource nationalization movements during the middle part of the twentieth century also helped to build a sense of “resource consciousness” among citizens who demanded that governments manage the sector and widely distribute the benefits (Dietrich 2017). Even when natural resources are privately owned, the government collects royalties, and its distributive choices are placed under similar scrutiny. Although we might think that democracies will be especially sensitive to public disapproval about distribution, even autocracies are responsive on this issue (Gandhi and Przeworski 2007). In resource-​rich countries with more political and social freedoms, social movements often call for greater distribution and better management of resource revenues. The impetus for mobilization may stem from popular perceptions about inefficient use of the revenues, corruption in the distributive mechanisms, or anger over inequality between resource-​rich regions and resource-​poor regions (Arellano-​Yanguas 2011). In South Africa, protests over the distribution and management of platinum revenues have occurred for decades (Arce and Miller 2016). In Peru, protests have erupted over perceptions of inequity in the distribution of mineral rents (Arce et al. 2018; Avila, Viale, and Monge 2011). Concerned citizens have engaged in conflict, sometimes violent, against the government and mining companies in Bolivia and Ecuador (Perreault and Valdivia 2010). In Nigeria, protest over the distribution of oil revenues has led to attacks on state institutions and oil production facilities (Watts 2004). Although mobilization is witnessed in all types of resource producers, one study found that non-​oil mineral wealth is associated with more protest among sub-​Saharan

584    Mohannad Al-Suwaidan and Nimah Mazaheri African countries since 1990. Yet oil wealth has no relationship with the likelihood of protest in these countries (Arce and Miller 2016). Most research on the link between distribution and mobilization in the resource-​rich context focuses on single cases or countries; however, there is some recent cross-​national work. One study finds that the spread of popular dissent in oil-​rich countries is positively linked to better distribution in water and sanitation services. Yet not all types of dissent are associated with more distribution. Oil-​rich countries that experience nonviolent dissent like peaceful demonstrations tend to provide better water and sanitation services than oil-​ rich countries that experience violent dissent like guerilla warfare (Mazaheri 2017). Faced with a nonviolent movement, an oil-​rich government can more easily “spend its way” out of a challenging situation. However, existential threats to an oil-​rich government are more likely to result in clamp-​downs and restrictions on distribution that seek to discourage resistance and weaken the opposition. Examples of this are the government’s assaults on the healthcare system during the unrest in Bahrain and Libya in 2011. The environmental damage caused by resource-​intensive activities generates its own type of citizen mobilization. This is typically focused on calls to end resource extraction, curtail energy exports, or respect the rights of Indigenous communities that are adversely affected by extractive activities (Jaskoski 2014; Riofrancos 2017; Zayed and Sowers 2014). In some ways, it may seem that environmental-​and rights-​based social movements are at odds with movements that center on distribution issues: whereas the former tend to be anti-​extraction the latter tend to be pro-​extraction. There can be real differences in the goals and outcomes of these two types of movements. Research in Latin America finds that distribution-​focused movements tend to make specific and negotiable demands, whereas environmental rights-​ based movements tend to make broad and non-​negotiable demands. Yet environmental rights-​based movements are more effective in producing concessions from the state or mining companies. By contrast, distribution-​focused movements tend to produce limited and localized results (Arce 2014, 2016). That being said, the dichotomy between these two types of movements is not always strict, and social movements can shift their goals over time. For instance, research on the conflict over oil mining in Ecuador’s Cofán communities finds the younger generation more open to the idea of extraction while still calling for more profit-​sharing, transparency, and ecologically friendly methods of extraction (Reilly 2020). Public backlash from changes in distribution programs is often intense, and thus politicians tread carefully on these issues. Sometimes an official reversal of policy follows, as occurred in Nigeria after violent protests followed the government’s decision to end fuel subsidies (Moss et al. 2015; Fails 2019). In Oman, distributive reforms were initially accepted due to low oil prices, but there were protests calling for a reversal once oil prices bounced back (Krane 2018). Since the mid-​2000s, at least 19 countries have witnessed protests over government decisions to curtail fuel subsidies (Ross, Hazlett and Mahdavi 2017). While a substitution benefit may help limit the backlash, in many places the public is skeptical that the government will provide a realistic substitute (Kyle 2018; Segal 2012). In countries with low state capacity, this skepticism is well-​founded. Such a government will struggle with effectively implementing targeted distribution instead of a universal subsidy. In this situation, the decision to reform a core distributive program can spark a broader referendum on leaders and shine a light on other problems like corruption (Kyle 2018; Lockwood 2015). Citizens hold strong opinions about distribution, which enters the calculus of leaders thinking about making drastic policy changes. These opinions can translate into political

Natural Resources and the Politics of Distribution    585 action that stymies the plans of reform-​seeking governments. Consider the potential effects on public support when the government expresses a desire to move from a universal subsidy to targeted distribution. Most targeted programs are intended to benefit the poor. However, there are many “nearly poor” and middle-​class citizens who will benefit from a universal subsidy but not from a program targeted at the poor (Lockwood 2015). They are likely to voice their disapproval, and most governments fear a mobilized middle-​class more so than a mobilized poor. Policy change in the opposite direction—​from a targeted to a universal benefit—​can likewise be a thorny problem. Proposals to adopt cash-​based distribution instead of targeted benefits can give rise to “anti-​welfare” arguments from elites and the middle class. It is argued that cash-​based distribution “cannot take root unless political leaders champion them and convince middle-​class and wealthy taxpayers that such programs represent money well spent” (Moss et al. 2015, p. 28). Yet universal benefits may be the preferred method in other contexts due to fears about inequity in targeted forms of distribution. In gas-​exporting Qatar, research finds that citizens prefer to receive universal benefits instead of targeted benefits because citizens fear the latter will be “unevenly allocated and unguaranteed” (Gengler, Shockley, and Ewers 2021). Even when distribution is supposedly universal (or supposedly targeted), it is rarely so in practice due to deeply entrenched social practices or politically exclusionary polities. In Bahrain, despite universal distributive policies, there is evidence that the Sunni-​dominated government engages in selective distribution that benefits the Sunni population and disadvantages the Shia (Gengler 2015). Similarly, Shia Saudi Arabians living in the oil-​rich Eastern Province have long expressed disappointment that they did not benefit from the oil wealth to the same extent as Sunni Saudi Arabians living in oil-​poor regions (Jones 2010). In India, mistreated tribal groups in coal-​rich Jharkhand felt cut out from the benefits of the mineral wealth captured by upper-​caste elites (Prakash 2001). This helped provide impetus to a subnational state independence movement, which was achieved in 2000. In reality, even the most well-​intentioned and well-​administered distributive program will not supersede entrenched social practices and political hierarchies. If anything, history has shown that the patterns of distribution after a resource windfall are more likely to mirror preexisting social and economic divides.

Conclusion When the revenues from natural resources fail to improve the quality of life for all citizens, distributive policies are largely to blame. Leaders fail to devote enough of the resource revenues to public goods and services. Distributive programs may invite more corruption and leakage goes unchecked and uncontrolled. The complex and heterogeneous needs of citizens may be misunderstood or ignored in the design of distributive programs. The political consequences are disregarded, and reforms are pushed through to help balance budgets. But the stakes are very high for resource-​rich countries to get their distributive policies right. Unfortunately, there is no generic blueprint that a country can follow to marshal the beneficial potential of distribution. This is because each country faces its own constraints in terms of state capacity and regime type, domestic political pressures, and public opinion

586    Mohannad Al-Suwaidan and Nimah Mazaheri and citizen preferences. In one setting, fuel subsidies are seen by the public as a birthright, and cash-​based distribution is too great an administrative challenge. In another, cash-​based distribution is feasible but a progressive program that targets the poor is a political tinderbox. There are many factors to consider when thinking about which type(s) of distribution will best suit the needs and realities of a resource-​rich country. We believe that future research can help get us to a place where clearer recommendations about distribution in resource-​rich contexts can be made. In order to do so, four issues need to be tackled. The first concerns obtaining better data on distribution. The challenges of using government spending data to understand patterns in distribution were noted earlier. We can glean some insights from looking at spending data, but for most of the countries in the world where the stakes are truly the highest (abundant resources, low income, low state capacity) it is difficult to rely on these data to be accurate. Furthermore, we encounter the problems of overestimating or underestimating the actual levels of distribution. One alternative is to turn more toward citizen surveys of service access in order to assess the level of distribution. This is far preferable to looking at government spending data, but there are also the standard issues of data reliability and validity that this type of survey research faces. Where feasible, a better option is to collect spatially defined, micro-​level data. Satellite imagery data can capture the geographical distribution of a wide variety of services in an area, such as schools, health clinics, power supply, dams, roads, etc. Nevertheless, it must be acknowledged that not all types of distribution can be “seen from above.” While there is great potential in the analysis of digital tracking data or information from biometrics to understand other forms of distribution, there are also serious privacy risks and potential abuse from “digital dictatorships” that cannot be ignored (Shahbaz 2018). The second issue pertains to the political consequences of cash distribution. Despite the enthusiasm for this particular model, it may be a short-​or mid-​term economic boon for citizens but a long-​term political burden. On the one hand, the welfare-​enhancing aspects of cash distribution are becoming increasingly clear. It helps decrease poverty, inequality, and income volatility while encouraging positive behaviors such as healthcare check-​ups and sending children to school (in the case of conditional cash transfers). Many successful cash distribution programs have been implemented in countries both resource-​rich and resource-​poor. Cash distribution was a common policy used to counteract the effects of the COVID-​19 pandemic in 2020–​2021. Nearly 90 countries adopted a new cash transfer program at this time (Gentilini, Almenfi, and Dale 2020). But cash distribution is often politicized by leaders, which invites a potential downside to this type of distribution. Cash distribution programs have a tendency to benefit the government or leader that introduces or champions them, which in some contexts becomes a form of populist vote-​buying. Some studies show that cash distribution can improve electoral turnout (although this is often turnout for the incumbent or politician who promotes the program), but other studies find that it decreases turnout and leads to complacency (De La O 2013; Zucco 2013; Mahdavi 2018, 2020). Right now, we know far too little about the political implications of cash distribution, particularly in the autocratic setting. Given that the citizens of many resource-​rich countries already face autocratic rule, pushing for a policy that helps to entrench autocracy carries moral consequences. At the least, the political implications of cash distribution need to be better understood before pushing for its widespread adoption.

Natural Resources and the Politics of Distribution    587 The third issue concerns the role that citizens play in shaping the nature of distribution. Both the resource curse and rentier state theories have an implicit assumption that citizens are beholden to the actions and decisions of leaders who become empowered with the resource revenues. We now know that this assumption is incorrect on many levels. Although there is some research on the role that citizens play in relation to issues of taxation, accountability, and transparency in the resource-​rich context,7 very little is known about their role on issues of distribution. Yet distribution is one area of government policy in which all citizens are concerned because it affects their quality of life on a daily basis. Distribution also ties into the concerns that citizens have about accountability, trust, and voice. Achieving a better understanding of citizens’ attitudes and preferences about distribution can tell us what citizens want from their government and how this in turn affects their attitudes about the government itself. It provides insights into which types of distribution are feasible to implement, which are preferable, and which will be thoroughly—​and possibly violently—​rejected. The final issue concerns the linkages between distribution and environmental issues, which remain understudied in the writings on natural resource revenue and policy choices. As hinted earlier, there is a paradox at hand which needs to be better understood. For many resource-​rich but low-​income countries, resource-​led development is often thought to be the only way to raise the funds needed to increase distribution and enhance citizens’ quality of life in core respects. Yet this process will unavoidably destroy the environment and degrade citizens’ quality of life in other core respects. For many decades, balancing these opposing interests and consequences was something that took place within the confines of a nation and its domestic politics. But the movement to cut back on fossil fuel production to help address the threat of climate change has pushed these domestic conundrums into the international arena. How the governments of resource-​rich countries balance the need to address environmental concerns—​now both local as well as global—​while simultaneously attending to the citizenry’s distributional demands is likely to be a contentious issue in these places for a very long time.

Notes 1. For more on the resource curse, refer to Ross (2012), Frankel (2010). On the rentier state theory, refer to Mahdavy (1970), Beblawi (1987). 2. For more, refer to Segal (2012) on distribution and redistribution. 3. There are real concerns about the accuracy of government spending data. Most countries that are rich in oil and gas reserves rank low in the Open Budget Survey, which is a measurement of budget transparency and accountability (see Moss, Lambert, and Majerowicz 2015, p. 91). 4. For example, it is estimated that half of oil-​rich Azerbaijan’s government spending is channeled not through the official state budget but the national oil company (Moss et al. 2015, p. 48). In Algeria, Azerbaijan, Bolivia, and Nigeria, fuel subsidies are financed from the sale of oil but not recorded in national budgets (Moss et al. 2015, p. 50). 5. To be clear about the types of distributive policies we are examining, there are three necessary conditions that must be met to qualify as a “direct distributive policy”: (1) the policy must be financed largely by natural resource revenues, (2) the distribution

588    Mohannad Al-Suwaidan and Nimah Mazaheri reaches individuals and households that are outside of the resource extraction process, and (3) the policy directly increases the discretionary income of targeted individuals and households. This chapter does not focus on public-​sector employment, which can be thought of as its own special category of direct distribution and has already received a good deal of attention in the literature. 6. Smith (2007) proposes a similar timing argument to explain political stability outcomes in resource-​rich countries. Karl (1997) notes a path-​dependence approach to decision-​ making in oil-​rich countries. 7. See McGuirk (2013), Villar (2020), de la Cuesta et al. (2019).

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Chapter 31

Tem p oralit y, L i mi t e d Stateho od, a nd A fri c a ’ s Aband one d Mi ne s W. R. Nadège Compaoré and Nathan Andrews Introduction Climate change is a ticking time bomb and safeguarding the environment is a matter of urgency, a fact that is no longer a debate among environmental analysts and activists. This temporal dimension of environmental politics is increasingly identified as a significant analytical variable by scholars (Slawinski and Bansal 2012; Stern 2015). Popular environmental analysts and activists are also raising the alarm that real action can no longer wait. From authors like Naomi Klein (2014) highlighting the dire consequences of unbridled capitalism on the environment, to environmental activist movements such as Fridays for Future urging powerful world leaders to protect future generations before it is too late, time is central to discussions on environmental action (see also Joos de Moor’s chapter in this volume). In the mining sector, while existing scholarship has aimed to bring attention to the environmental consequences of this industry (Bridge 2004; Kirsch 2010; Auld et al. 2018), many of these efforts point to timid responses from states and corporations, which are decidedly not framed with the same level of urgency. Indeed, the primary policy goal has largely been to harness economic gains from the mineral sector, with dominant preoccupations focused on avoiding the economic downfalls of the so-​called resource curse (Sachs and Warner 1995; Ross 2015; see also Jones Luong and Weinthal 2010; Andrews and Siakwah 2021). In Africa in particular, Edwards et al. (2014) warn that the unprecedented mining boom that has occurred this past decade will severely impact the continent’s environment and its biodiversity unless careful policy measures are taken. For instance, in central Africa, where the vast Congo rainforest is found, government enforcement of Environmental Impact Assessments in the mining sector is “often weak or totally absent,” (Edwards et al. 2014, p. 308). This lack of government regulation of the environmental impact of mining is all the more striking given growing resistance from communities directly affected by mining and whose natural

Temporality, Limited Statehood, and Africa’s Abandoned Mines    593 habitats are irreparably ruined by extractive processes, including the destruction of their access to water, forestry, and fisheries resources (Conde 2017). The puzzling yet persistent delinking of environmental issues from mineral extraction in Africa can be traced back to the “mining for development” mantra pushed by the World Bank through Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs), which led to a further retreat of the state in order to foster foreign investment (Campbell 2003; 2010). For example, while the African Union initiated the Africa Mining Vision (AMV), which was announced in 2009 and designed to help mineral-​rich African host states assert greater agency over their mining sectors (Compaoré 2017), the focus has been largely on economic gains from the mineral sector, with the environmental impact of mining remaining out of the core agenda. Important contributions already discuss the importance of how framing affects whether and to what extent climate change and environmental issues matter to the wider public (Nisbet 2009; Moser 2010; Callison 2015). Our argument recognizes the importance of framing but also moves beyond unintentional consequences of framing to emphasize the active process through which state and corporate actors render invisible certain ontological premises with the aim of downplaying urgent matters. We take the ongoing lack of action on the environmental impact of mine closure in Africa as an example of an ontological premise that has been actively obscured in the policy agenda. We therefore prefer to conceptualize this active invisibilization of mine closure as an act of mine abandonment.1 In the extant literature on mine closure, some scholars use mine closure and mine abandonment interchangeably (see Bainton and Holcombe 2018, p. 470), while others use the two as complementary concepts (Field 2019). Bainton and Holcombe (2018, p. 470) recently raised concerns regarding the “language of closure” and warned that “the social aspects of mining can be ‘closed off ’ in a similar linear time-​bound fashion as the physical aspects of a mining operation.” For this reason, they call for an understanding of the “social aspects of mine closure” (Bainton and Holcombe, 2018). This is an important call for both open pit mines as well as artisanal and small-​scale mines, where mine abandonment is ubiquitous. We focus on open pit mines in our analysis in order to unpack key power dynamics between states, corporate actors, and local communities, given that the dominant policies on the mining–​ environment nexus have largely focused on formalized, large-​scale mining processes.2 We argue that the dynamics of invisibilization and silencing that occur when it comes to addressing the environmental repercussions of mine closure simply amount to mine abandonment, whereby the environmental planning, protection, and reclamation guidelines required from the contract stage all the way to the mine closure stage are dismissed and, indeed, abandoned. For example, at the contract stage, which mostly involves state actors and big multinational corporations in the context of large-​scale mining, environmental concerns relating to the process of mine closure are not typically detailed beyond basic notions of environmental impact, as we will see from our discussion. To further highlight this stance, the remainder of this chapter is divided into three parts. The next section briefly elaborates on the theoretical framework that guides our discussion in order to better contextualize our analysis and highlight our potential theoretical contributions. The second section further anchors the theoretical discussions within key empirical illustrations of how and why the process of mine abandonment, devoid of environmental accountability, persists in mineral-​rich African countries. We address global, regional, and national apparatuses that accentuate the silences in this key spatiotemporal dimension that represents the “final” stage of the mining life cycle. The concluding section

594    W. R. Nadège Compaoré and Nathan Andrews reflects on both the theoretical and empirical contributions of the analysis as well as its implications for comparative environmental politics (CEP) and environmental justice.

Ontological Politics and Geographies of Injustice What can the literature on CEP tell us about the ongoing silencing of environmental concerns from the agenda of mineral-​rich African governments? To address this question, we pay particular attention to the “post-​extraction” stage of the mine cycle, which we identify as one of the most neglected stages of policy interventions in the mining–​environment nexus. Our analysis is theoretically informed by Upendra Baxi’s concept of “geographies of injustice” (2016a) and frames our understanding of ontological silences highlighted earlier as a matter of environmental justice. Based on Baxi’s conceptualization, geographies of injustice are constructed through conflict and harm, where “conflict of laws thrives amidst the realms of ‘real’ and ‘imagined’ geographies” (Baxi 2016a, p. 26). We argue that the realm of mine closure has been framed as an “imagined” geography, whereby the “future” of mine closure (i.e., the longue durée of its environmental impact) has been silenced from state concerns. This ultimately places the space–​time locale that the mine closure stage embodies into an imaginary that can be sidelined. These tensions also illustrate state–​corporate temporal silences regarding the mining life cycle, particularly around the “final” stage of the extractive process, a stage that, in fact, is not final, given that it is the beginning of further, long-​lasting environmental destruction. In industries such as the extractive sector, for instance, as Baxi (2016b, p. 19) reminds us, “the motto of developers everywhere is ‘No development without destruction.’ ” This reinforces the idea that some degree of development, no matter how destructive, is not only inevitable, but that it is also just (Baxi 2016b, p. 19). While Kirsch (2010) maintains that the concept of “sustainable mining” is nothing short of an oxymoron, key CEP literature concerned with the links between mining and the environment have often focused on uncovering the effectiveness of environmental protection in the mining sector, particularly at the domestic level. On the topic of mine closure specifically, Field (2019, p. 299) has, for instance, identified three core roles that can be played by states: (1) being a watchdog (during the development and operation of the mine), (2) being an actor that relinquishes its role (during mine closure), and (3) being a mender of last resort (vis-​à-​vis abandoned and orphaned mines). What is common about these different approaches to mine closure is a justification of pursuing states’ extractivist goals, such that the possibility of foregoing mining is hardly questioned. What is also missing from the debate here is that the certainty of environmental destruction that comes with mineral extraction is not acknowledged in current policy framing of mine closure. Rather, this framing simply hides the inevitable mining-​induced environmental destruction, allowing state and corporate interests to pursue their course of action. It is no surprise that the corporate-​led International Council on Mining and Metals (ICMM) speaks of “sustainable mine closure” (ICMM 2019) or that innovation-​driven analysts seek to identify avenues for making mine closure “sustainable” (Menéndez et al. 2019, p. 498) when

Temporality, Limited Statehood, and Africa’s Abandoned Mines    595 proposing that abandoned mines be used for underground hydroelectric energy storage and other energy applications. This brief, critical overview of the framing of mine closure as a final stage of extraction highlights a core ontological silence in existing policies: namely, the devastating and long-​ lasting environmental effects of mine closure. We align with Forsyth and Levidow’s (2015, p. 141) point that “comparative environmental analysis needs clarity about what is being compared; how and by whom this is identified; and how some comparative approaches may hide these questions.” How and why environmental regulation of mine closures is absent from dominant scholarship on the mining–​environment nexus in Africa also reflects the marginalization of this topic at the policy level and speaks to the fact that paying attention to “ontological politics” (Forsyth and Levidow 2015) can yield important insights in CEP. Thus, our analysis seeks to highlight how and why the construction of these ontological politics occur, by paying attention to the key actors such as host African states and transnational mining companies.

Structural Silences in the Multilevel Governance of Mine Closures To empirically illustrate this discussion, a multilevel analysis of governance and policy interventions is necessary to explore the silences that reproduce invisible geographies of injustice in mine closures. In situating this analysis within CEP literature, our approach here is also informed by insights from literature on global norm-​making. We align with Cao et al.’s (2014) view that the line between domestic and international issues in CEP is not a clear dichotomy. Rather, it is productive to bring together epistemological insights from comparative politics and international relations scholarship when seeking to open up research avenues in this subfield. In this section, we show how and why silences on the criticality of mine closures remain ongoing at multiple governance levels.

Global Level: Norms and Mine Closure Blinders Although there is no global standard on mine closure (Field 2019), some global norms are seen as important standards meant to facilitate the promotion of best practices that support corporate social responsibility (CSR) across the entire value chain of a mining operation (see Andrews 2019a). Ranging from those that are focused on almost everything (e.g., UN Global Compact and the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development [OECD] Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises) to those that are specifically focused on corruption and financial disclosure (e.g., the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative), human rights and security (e.g., the Voluntary Principles on Business and Human Rights and the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights), or sustainable development

596    W. R. Nadège Compaoré and Nathan Andrews (e.g., the Mining Association of Canada [MAC]’s Towards Sustainable Mining Guiding Principles, the IFC’s Performance Standards and the ICMM’s Sustainable Development framework), these normative apparatuses are in place to safeguard communities from the devastating impacts of mining. One common feature, however, is that they are “soft” law mechanisms that are mostly subject to the voluntary compliance of those who subscribe to them (Dashwood 2014; Andrews 2019b). They are also established by tripartite multistakeholder arrangements that bring together corporations, governments, and civil society—​which is characteristic of the growing uptake of public–​private partnerships (PPPs) in global (environmental) governance. Finally, what such transnational governance initiatives have in common when it comes to the mining sector is their neglect of the mine closure stage (Auld et al. 2018). Since the 1990s, the UN has been an advocate for multistakeholder and collaborative corporate initiatives that were later imagined to advance global sustainable development as evidenced in the Millennium Development Goals (2000–​2015) and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) (2015–​2030). Since 2000, the UN Global Compact has emerged as one of the leading CSR initiatives that has a set of ten principles out of which three are dedicated to the role of business in promoting environmental responsibility (Andrews 2021). Despite this environmental emphasis and the Compact’s association with the current SDGs, there is no specific attention paid to mine closure. Another influential global norm for the mining industry is the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs), which provides a “protect, respect and remedy” framework that underscores the duty of states to protect human rights and the responsibility of corporations to respect human rights. There is some reference to how human rights can be incorporated as part of other risk/​impact assessments including social and environmental impact (United Nations 2011, p. 20). But beyond this minimal reference, there is no further detail on environmental provisions. One can argue that this is partly a result of the narrow understanding of human rights, which manifests in the UNGP in terms of its negligible reference to the natural environment within which human rights abuses manifest. We also see this narrow orientation toward human rights and security in the Voluntary Principles on Security and Human Rights (VPs), which has no principle covering the environment nor any specific mechanism targeting the human security challenges and violence caused by the mining industry’s environmental degradation. Like the UN Global Compact, UNGPs, and VPs, the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI) has become a widely used standard in the global extractive industry, with nearly half of its members being African states as of 2022. It was primarily established to address issues around corruption and the state–​corporation collusion that often results in resource rents neither reaching deserving beneficiaries nor being used for broader developmental purposes (Sovacool and Andrews 2015). The core focus on financial disclosure (i.e., the government publishing what it receives from corporations and corporations publishing what they pay), however, has limited the initiative’s contribution to a deeper understanding of the nested nature of revenue, transparency, the environment and a whole assemblage of actors that determine the manifestations of resource extraction (Andrews and Siakwah 2021). The idea that sunshine is the best disinfectant in this context (Sovacool and Andrews 2015) relies on only an aspect of the larger body of mining-​related problems being disinfected (i.e., what is made visible) while other areas such as environmental degradation in the extractive sector (i.e., what is constructed as invisible) remain untouched. The

Temporality, Limited Statehood, and Africa’s Abandoned Mines    597 temporal significance of extraction stages such as the mine closure phase becomes especially poignant when considering this constructed invisibility, given that accountability for future environmental consequences becomes absent when focus is only on the production phase of extraction. The International Finance Corporation’s Performance Standards can be regarded as providing specific guidelines for sustainable mining activities, especially for projects that the World Bank supports financially (Adeyemi 2014). The eight standards cover areas such as risk mitigation, labor, resource efficiency, land resettlement, biodiversity, Indigenous people, community, and cultural heritage. The standards specifically advance a requirement for companies to seek the free, prior, and informed consent of communities and peoples to be impacted. These requirements are stringent to the extent that loans for mining projects are often dependent on companies’ compliance, and many mining projects in Africa are reliant on such financial support. However, it is not known whether there is any expectation for companies to do much, once a mine is closed or whether there are follow-​ups to ensure that money that may have been allotted for “post-​mine” socio-​environmental initiatives is used accordingly. The OECD Guidelines suggest that “sound environmental management is an important part of sustainable development, and is increasingly being seen as both a business responsibility and a business opportunity” (OECD 2011, p. 44). While “sound environmental management” is expected to be interpreted broadly to include both direct and indirect impacts of the activities of industry on the environment, one cannot overlook the underpinning reasoning of seeing environmental sustainability as a business opportunity. The rationale for “sound environmental management” therefore reads as follows: “instituting an environmental management system can provide economic benefits to companies through reduced operating and insurance costs, improved energy and resource conservation, reduced compliance and liability charges, improved access to capital and skills, improved customer satisfaction, and improved community and public relations” (OECD 2011, p. 44). Although one may expect that, by following these guidelines, corporations may also consider processes for sound management of the environment after mine closure, there are no specific principles in the OECD Guidelines that support this undertaking. This means that even though there is some reference to being cognizant of the “full life cycle” of a mining operation (OECD 2011, p. 43), the empirical temporality of mining’s “final stage” is often silenced and only imagined to exist. In terms of global frameworks, two places that offer best practices guidelines on mine closure are the ICMM and the MAC). On the surface, the ICMM’s practice guide is focused on making mine closure integral to the complete life cycle of a mining project based on establishing and refining clear objectives that closure “should be an integrated, multidisciplined and multi-​stakeholder process” (ICMM 2019, p. 18). The guide proposes the implementation of progressive closure, which entails planning for closure activities during and beyond the operating phase of a mining project. The guide also provides some tools and mechanisms for managing post-​closure land use, social transition (investment and costs) for mine closure, and sudden closure (ICMM 2019). Effective management of mine closure is also core to the MAC’s Towards Sustainable Mining (TSM) Guiding Principles. In 2008, the MAC Board adopted the TSM framework on mine closure that-​requires MAC members to establish mine closure plans in consultation with communities of interest. In Canada, for instance, mining companies are required to plan for closure before

598    W. R. Nadège Compaoré and Nathan Andrews commencing production and to provide the financial assurance to ensure such plans can be carried out in an effective manner. The expectation, therefore, is that MAC members operating overseas (prominently in Africa) will transfer such best practices to the jurisdictional contexts and regional variations within which they operate. The ICMM and the MAC are leading corporate organizations, which makes the absence of state actors from norm-​making dynamics in mine closure even more acute. In fact, the Annual International Conference on Mine Closure, which was at its 14th edition in 2021, is a globally recognized industry-​led series of conferences that largely speak to mining professionals, and where key discussions are often centered on the technical aspects of mine closure. Although this annual conference sees the participation of scholars and some state actors, the fact that it is driven by industry reflects both the growing trend in industry self-​regulation (Dashwood 2014) and the state–​corporate collusion that reproduces the invisibilization of post-​mining environmental concerns. Additionally, the triple bottom line mantra of 3Ps (people, planet, and profits) (Elkington 1997) that underpins the creation of these corporate sustainability norms is questionable considering the invisibilities and injustices that are built into normative arrangements at the discretion of corporations. This presents three sets of challenges for global environmental governance worth noting. First, it privileges corporate interests over those of society and people, despite the purported 3Ps that led to the creation of such governance norms. Thus, despite the strategic placement of people and planet ahead of profits, what happens on the ground suggests otherwise, given ongoing legitimization of the “right to harm.”3 Also, this triple bottom line is often misconstrued as providing an equal playing field for all parties involved, but hardly does it serve the interests of all (see Aaronson 2011). Indeed, comparative analysis of mining globally (Cuvelier 2019) shows that large-​scale mining projects are driven by elites with core capitalist interests that are likely to trump people’s or the planet’s interests. Second, the type of collaborative governance involving corporations, states, and civil society represents new and sustained forms of public–​private collusion that augments capitalist accumulation at the expense of the environment and people’s livelihoods. It underpins a state–​corporate complicity that gives less priority to the full temporality of the mine life cycle and its broader environmental politics even when we are made to believe that corporations are undertaking “sustainable mining.” The ICMM insists that sustainable mine closure is a “shared endeavour requiring collaboration between the industry, communities, and governments to address the environmental, social and economic aspects of closure” (ICMM 2019, p. 25). However, what this understanding of “shared endeavor” or “shared responsibility” conceals is the power differential between communities, government, and industry. Often, what is presented as “shared” is the interests of certain dominant groups such as state and corporate actors and what they deem to be profitable endeavors. Third, the global norms discussed earlier often expect a great deal of buy-​in from African countries and are guided by a “savior complex” led by transnational mining companies. The latter are expected to help salvage poor African countries from themselves through superficial CSR initiatives such as building schools and hospitals, usually without the long-​term resources and planning established for sustainability. Rather, this salvationism is geared toward extracting as much economic gains as possible without due regard for environmental protection. Given the SAPs enforced in African countries in the 1980s and 1990s, which offered generous taxation terms to foreign investors, most mineral-​rich African

Temporality, Limited Statehood, and Africa’s Abandoned Mines    599 host states had retreated from asserting their agency over their mineral resources. This was the case for Ghana, which was the first mining sector to be liberalized on the continent in 1986, followed by others such as Guinea in 1995 and Mali in 1999 (Besada and Martin 2013). This led to corporations taking up the lion’s share in terms of investments, but also to self-​regulation as the main process of regulation in Africa’s mining sector (Campbell 2003, 2010). The announcement of initiatives such as the Africa Mining Vision a decade ago initially showed promise of collective regional power, with suggestions that this could signal African states’ efforts at reclaiming ownership over the governance of their mineral resources (Compaoré 2018). However, the legacies of SAPs have continued to reinforce limited statehood in Africa’s mining sector, further exacerbated by enduring corporate self-​ regulation. Many African countries have therefore neglected the requisite role they need to play in safeguarding host mining communities from the encroachment of powerful economic interests on their land. This phenomenon also has significant ramifications for the security and sustainable livelihoods of people and communities (Andrews and Essah 2020; Enns et al. 2020). For example, the “watchdog” role of the state as regards environmental protection cannot be duly performed within the current framing, where the state is also the receiver of revenues that are deemed crucial to key projects promised by coalitions of ruling elites. Even in thinking of the state’s role as “mender of last resort” in the case of abandoned and orphaned mines (see Field 2019), the absence of clear guidelines suggests that once a mine is closed or abandoned, the collaborative governance support may no longer be available to implement after-​the-​fact best practices. This section has exposed the structural asymmetries between foreign corporate power, host African states, and local communities when it comes to the governance of mining in Africa and mine closures more specifically. Existing guidelines regarding mine closure are self-​regulated by industry with no real oversight from state actors, and without consequential input from local communities. The status quo of profits-​first continues to make invisible the long-​lasting environmental impact of mining once mines are closed and, in effect, abandoned. Even if, or when, some global-​level normative arrangements are born of good intentions, an essential question remains: best practices for what and for whom? Even if all existing global norms examined here have provisions for post-​production effective environmental management and governance, one may still need to be critical about the scope, purpose, and expected beneficiaries of such “soft” law (and self-​regulatory) mechanisms—​ including the extent to which they reinforce existing state–​corporate dynamics.

Regional Level: Potential for Mine Closure Visibility in the Africa Mining Vision? Some scholars view the AMV as part of the “fourth” generation of mining codes, a bold model for natural resource governance in Africa (Besada and Martin 2013). The AMV symbolizes a proactive departure from a neoclassical economic development model underpinning the continent’s previous three generations of mining codes, which were informed by neoliberal SAPs of the 1980s (Besada and Martin 2015). Thus, the Vision in essence represents a resistance to previous generations of mining legislation that sought to

600    W. R. Nadège Compaoré and Nathan Andrews prioritize foreign interests over those of African states (Campbell 2003, 2010). This policy direction has come to represent a resurgence of resource nationalism, local economic development (Ackah-​Baidoo 2020), or a “capacitated developmental state” in Africa (Pedro 2012). Generally characterized as “a paradigm whose time has come” (Busia and Akong 2017), the AMV is seen as a promising initiative that could shift the pendulum of power into the hands of African states and peoples (Compaoré 2018). In particular, its promise lies in its focus on holistic and broad-​based sustainable growth and socio-​economic development (AU 2009). A search for four key terms such as “mine closure,” “reclamation,” “mine abandonment,” and “closure planning” within the AMV policy document resulted in zero results. The absence of these keywords reveals a striking gap in the AMV’s scope, given that the unprecedented mining boom on the continent over the past decade will necessarily yield future mine closure. A further search for “land” in the AMV resulted in a few matches in relation to land taxes/​rents, land use planning, and land optimization “to promote environmental stewardship and social responsibility” (AU 2009, p. 39). There is no direct discussion of mine closure in the document. Also emphasized is the need for improved regulatory regimes via the adoption of the highest environmental standards. This aligns with the objective of creating and sustaining mineral wealth without jeopardizing efforts toward the preservation of the environment. Program Cluster 7 of the AMV’s Action Plan is devoted to the environment and social issues, with the core aim of establishing a mining sector that is environmentally friendly, socially responsible, and stakeholder-​oriented (AU 2011, p. 28). The specific actionable strategies include making social, environmental, and health impact assessments mandatory for all project approvals in the medium term while ensuring that mining companies set aside specific environmental and social funds as a requirement for continued operations. This objective is important given ongoing contestations over the devastating environmental impacts of mining across the continent (Edwards et al. 2014; Essah and Andrews 2016; Leonard 2018). Though the AMV is characterized as a forward-​looking “fourth-​generation” mining code that goes beyond mere neoclassical economics, it remains primarily motivated by economic interests. For instance, an interesting usage of “environment” depicts the creation of “a conducive environment to enhance the flow of domestic and foreign investment to the minerals and energy sectors” (AU 2009, p. 43). This underpins the AMV’s logic of harnessing Africa’s natural resource endowment for the continent’s development, which begs the questions of “what kind of development, and at whose expense?” It also speaks to the dominant logic that promotes mining as a solution without imagining the alternative of “no mining” or the possible ontological premise of “no [destructive] development.” Within the context of the silences placed on spatiotemporal environmental issues such as mine abandonment, powerful African state elites—​architects of the AMV and its propagation—​perpetuate practices and structures that merely bolster the expected economic outcomes of mining instead of focusing on the sustainable aspects of those practices. This is problematic for many reasons. By constructing a narrative that supports the idea of extraction for optimal broad-​based national gains, the emphasis of the AMV appears to be on how African countries can best utilize their natural resources for economic growth. Admittedly, this is an important goal for a continent whose resources and capital have been ravaged by foreign interests for many decades. Yet, despite the important goal of putting Africa’s economic development into its own hands, the question of whether the continent

Temporality, Limited Statehood, and Africa’s Abandoned Mines    601 has indeed escaped the broader neoliberalization of the mining industry remains, even in this fourth generation of African mining reforms. While implementing the AMV as a regional vision, individual African states have become battlegrounds for competing capitalist interests, where state–​corporate temporal silences regarding the complete life cycle of mining are manifested. It is hard to capture the level of variation between the top 10 African mining states such as Botswana, South Africa, Ghana, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Tanzania, or other notable ones like Madagascar, as such an assessment would be conflated by significant differences, including levels of economic power and different timelines in terms of their experiences in the mineral sector. Furthermore, the bulk of existing scholarship on mining in Africa tends to neglect North Africa, with a primary focus on sub-​ Saharan Africa. These differences are well-​illustrated in the implementation of the AMV at the national level through the Country Mining Vision. For instance, an Oxfam study of the AMV implementation across Africa, in 2017, showed that while some countries like Lesotho prioritized a “systematic” approach to domesticating their Country Mining Vision, others such as Tanzania and Mozambique adopted a more “targeted” approach (Oxfam 2017, p. 19). Despite these key differences, the common thread remains a salient marginalization of an environmental agenda from policy priorities across the different mining countries implementing the AMV, including a lack of substantial directives regarding mine closure.

Country-​L evel: State Resource Nationalism or State-​C orporate “Right to Harm” There is a legacy of weak state participation in the legal structures of most mineral-​rich African countries, where existing legal frameworks fail to protect the host country’s economic, social, and environmental interests (see Campbell 2003). In this context, which easily made room for CSR measures dictated by corporate interests, many host African states continue to ignore the significance of abandoned mines when developing their mining policies. A significant concern of aid-​providing institutions such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, which shaped the policy priorities of these host states through SAPs has long insisted on the “mining for development” mantra. This explains why the “production” phase of mining has quickly become the main site of intervention for policy-​makers on the continent. This dominant focus on production speaks to a focus on mining revenues, leading to the “post-​production” stage (marked by the departure of mining companies) being largely erased from policy agenda. In Burkina Faso, a country that has seen one of the most intense mining booms on the continent over the past two decades followed by intense mining reforms, there has been virtually no attention paid to the issue of mine rehabilitation in the country’s mining legal structures. The Burkinabè mining code was first established in 1997, reformed in 2003, and most recently revised in 2015. Recent work on the Burkinabè mining reforms shows that no “mine rehabilitation and closure fund” was “accounted for” in the first two iterations of the mining code. For example, recent reforms show greater financial ownership over the mining sector, with corporate tax exemption being reduced from seven years in 1997 to three years in 2015, or state contribution to local development being unaccounted for in 1997 and now representing

602    W. R. Nadège Compaoré and Nathan Andrews 20 percent of proportionate fees collected in the 2015 mining code (Zongo 2019). Yet the new mining code still does not specify an annual fee for mining companies to fund rehabilitation (Zongo 2019). This means that the future environmental consequences of mine abandonment are altogether unaccounted for on a systematic level, a situation reflected in many national mineral codes across the continent. Comparably, even in African mining countries with a longer history of extensive mining extraction, where state actors may deploy more institutional resources to address mining-​induced environmental issues, intervention efforts continue to be focused on the production phase. This is the case in Ghana, where the Environmental Protection Rating Disclosure (a.k.a. AKOBEN) was used between 2009 and 2012 as a measure to ensure corporate compliance with environmental standards (Essah and Andrews 2016; Bawua and Owusu 2018). Under the AKOBEN framework, the environmental performance of mining corporations was assessed using a five-​color rating scheme—​gold, green, blue, orange, and red—​representing environmental performance ranging from excellent to poor. At the time, this now defunct framework was considered one of the best environmental management tools in the country. Yet it ignored mine abandonment altogether, given that its multitiered system of measuring environmental performance was limited to the production phase. Although recent research shows that mining companies in Ghana seem to have prioritized land reclamation in their discourses of first-​order priorities when it comes to sustainable mining (Essah and Andrews 2016), effective legal structures to enforce the environmental regulation of mine abandonment remain absent. In fact, Ghana’s approach to mine abandonment represents what Field (2019) calls the “fence and walk away” approach, common across the continent. This reinforces the geographies of injustice that come with the “post-​ production” or “mine abandonment” phase. Beyond existing legal and policy structures failing to address the mine abandonment stage in mineral-​rich African countries, state–​investor agreements in the mining sector, namely mining contracts, represent an important site for assessing the process of mine abandonment at the country level. The mining contract stage involves unfair terms and irregularities shaped by significant power asymmetries between host African states and foreign investors (Compaoré 2019). However, existing critiques of these unfair contracts have largely focused on economic terms, as with the policy structures discussed in earlier sections. For instance, if the contract stage represents an inevitable primary stage in the mining life cycle, it is a missed opportunity that relevant parties do not use it to secure more sustainable terms that would account for the mine abandonment stage. In focusing on mining contracts, we highlight a “right to harm” principle in how/​why concerns over mine abandonment continue to be silenced and how this reflects the temporal blind spots underpinning state–​corporate dynamics. When considering mining contracts, western and southern Africa stand out as core locations where the continent’s top mining companies operate and where a key contrast exists in terms of practices around mine closure. Two mining contracts in Ghana and Zambia are respectively illustrative here. In Ghana, the agreement between the Republic of Ghana and Newmont (of May 4, 2015) reveals important insights. First, the clauses do not explicitly include anything titled “mine closure” or “mine abandonment.” This means that although evidence abounds that not all mining projects successfully complete the full life cycle, this aspect is taken for granted in mining contracts. Second, the agreement contains a stabilization clause that removes all accountability from Newmont, post-​production. The clause states that

Temporality, Limited Statehood, and Africa’s Abandoned Mines    603 Newmont “shall not be affected by any Law enacted after January 1, 2014 or by any changes to any Law in existence as of January 1, 2014 if such new Law or amended Law has the effect of either imposing upon [Newmont] any new of additional Taxes and Duties” (Republic of Ghana/​Newmont 2015, p. 6). This basic stability period, which runs until December 31, 2027, is also subject to an extended additional term of 5 years after its termination. This suggests that the agreement is locked in until December 31, 2032—​a period during which the mining company would not be expected to bear any new costs or responsibilities emanating from the impact of its activities. This reflects the relinquishing role of the state (Field 2019) via stabilization clauses. By stabilizing the capitalist interests in extraction, considerations such as environmental protection are made invisible both as a contractual requirement and a material manifestation of a mining project. This underpins the legal legitimization that occurs as a result of the deliberate legal vacuum created through the stabilization clause. Third, although environmental impact assessments typically precede mining contracts, it is curious that this mining contract itself does not include more systematic concerns regarding the environmental impact of mineral extraction following the departure of the company. In Zambia, the agreement between the Government of the Republic of Zambia and Chibuluma Mines Plc of September 30, 1997, initially appears to pay closer attention to environmental issues. For instance, a clause titled “environmental issues” under a section of the agreement titled “undertakings necessary for operations” stipulates that the company shall comply with “environmental and safety laws and regulations enacted or promulgated within Zambia from time to time which are of general application” (Republic of Zambia/​ Chibuluma Mines 1997, p. 25). The agreement also has provisions for an environmental plan and “clean-​up” obligations based on specific timelines. For clean-​up, the agreement states that “the company will also assume all obligations for clean-​up following mine closure until such a time as a closure certificate is granted” (Republic of Zambia/​Chibuluma Mines 1997, p. 62). Additionally, progressive rehabilitation and monitoring of water and air quality would be undertaken prior to and during mine closure. The Zambian example represents what Field (2019) considers as the watchdog role of the state during the development and operation of a mine. This is an interesting element, given that the contract was concluded before the early 2000s, an era marked by the legacies of SAPs on the mining sector. One may be tempted to applaud Zambia, given the Ghanaian case. However, the “taxation stability” clause within this agreement, which lasts for 15 years, presents similar expectations on the legal legitimization of long-​term destructive outcomes. In other words, even though Zambia has become known as a leading country in the recent wave of resource nationalism on the continent, the primary focus of its mineral sector remains on revenue collection. This suggests that the state makes compromises to attract investors. Zambia is indeed heavily dependent on its copper industry, which accounts for more than 70 percent of exports (Saunders and Caramento 2018). Despite its apparent provisions for environmental protection, the lack of diversification away from the mineral sector given the inevitability of abandoned mines over time, and the dire consequences of mine abandonment are not actually considered in the government’s long-​term plans. Without plans to address the dependence on mining despite the environmental destruction in the production and “mine closure” phases, and without concrete plans on the “progressive rehabilitation” plans mentioned in the aforementioned clause, this agreement represents wider norms that normalize the “right to harm” through mineral extraction.

604    W. R. Nadège Compaoré and Nathan Andrews

Conclusion There are approximately 1 million abandoned mines in the world (Menéndez et al. 2019). The image of an open-​pit mine has essentially become a powerful symbol, often used in public fora to visually convey the profound legacies of environmental destruction left behind by mineral extraction. One would therefore expect more careful planning for mine rehabilitation since policy resistance to mining still appears to be out of governments’ agenda. Across mineral-​rich African countries, the lack of careful pre-​consideration of this spatiotemporal dimension of the mine cycle by state actors and the resulting lack of environmental accountability that remains unaddressed is particularly striking. How and why does this lack of accountability become justified—​and even normalized? Our chapter sought to address this question by highlighting key global, regional, and country-​level normative processes underpinning the silencing of mine closure and their implications for the policy agenda of African states. In doing so, we reframe the mine closure stage as effectively representing mine abandonment, in order to emphasize the intentional policy inaction at this crucial stage of the mining life cycle. Theoretically informed by Baxi’s (2016a) concept of “geographies of injustice,” our analysis aimed to recenter concepts of environmental justice within CEP literature by highlighting the legal “right to harm” embedded within legal structures governing mineral extraction (such as mining codes and mining contracts) as key to how environmental destruction is rendered invisible in dominant narratives on extraction. For instance, in constructing the narrative of mine abandonment as closure and as a “final” stage of mineral extraction, existing literature ultimately masks the fact that these mines are in fact abandoned and that this abandonment stage represents the first stage of a new cycle of environmental harm that local communities must contend with, following the departure of mining companies. This analysis is therefore a call to rethink the ontological politics of what issue gets prioritized and how, not only in policy practices but also in the scholarship. We hope our discussion provides insights for further conversations on the temporal dimensions of how and why policy interventions toward environmental regulation in Africa’s mineral sector are constructed. Future research in the mining–​environment nexus can yield productive avenues by focusing on this dimension of temporality and specifically by problematizing the idea of finality in the mining life cycle. Moreover, given the importance of artisanal and small-​scale mining (ASM) in Africa, a future research agenda should employ the multiscalar analysis undertaken in this chapter in the context of large-​scale mining to examine its relevance for the ASM sector. The ASM sector remains important to a discussion of mine abandonment, but perhaps due to what Hilson (2019) calls a “bias” toward large-​scale mine development in Africa, policy and academic work on the mining–​environment nexus and on the notion of finality in informal mining operations is seriously lagging. This could inform a future research agenda on the comparative environmental politics of mine closure/​abandonment in Africa. Another important question to be taken up in future research is how global norms have changed mining contracts over time and how these changes have impacted policy on mine closure and abandonment. Existing research has shown how international norms can shape

Temporality, Limited Statehood, and Africa’s Abandoned Mines    605 contracts and ownership structure in a manner that has important ramifications for the material outcomes of resource extraction (see Jones Luong and Weinthal 2010). It would be interesting to interrogate which different norms initiated by global corporate organizations such as the ICMM, the MAC, or the Annual Conference on Mine Closure have shaped policy changes in the African context. At the regional level, future work can also explore the potential of the AMV or other policy initiatives to serve as a normative benchmark for governing the currently invisibilized arena of mine closure/​abandonment. All these suggestions point to a number of uncharted areas of research in the field of comparative environmental politics in Africa.

Acknowledgments We thank Mdu Mhlanga for his excellent research assistance, and we thank the editors for their insightful and constructive comments. Any remaining errors are our own.

Notes 1. In the rest of this paper, we use “mine closure” when referring to analysis that uses that terminology, or when critiquing the time-​bound usage of this stage of the mine cycle, which we will make explicit when so. Otherwise, we will use the term “mine abandonment.” 2. For more discussion on the neglect of artisanal, small-​scale mining within policy agendas locally and globally, see Balag’kutu et al. (2018). 3. We use the “right to harm” here to speak to the institutionalization and legitimization of the harm principle in transnational dynamics; see Baxi (2016b, pp. 24–​25). For a detailed discussion on the histories of “harm narrative” across the world, see Linklater, The Problem of Harm in World Politics: Theoretical Investigations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).

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Chapter 32

Il l egal Wildli fe T ra de in the Mekong The Interplay of Actors, Legal Governance, and Political Economy

Songkhun Nillasithanukroh, Ekta Patel, Edmund Malesky, and Erika Weinthal Introduction On March 29, 2019, Vietnamese port authorities announced the seizure of nine tons of ivory—​the biggest seizure ever recorded (EIA 2019). The same year, international nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) confirmed that the Mekong region remained a key global hub in the international wildlife trafficking network, with trade links to high-​demand markets elsewhere in China and the United States1 (WWF 2020). After habitat degradation, illegal wildlife trade (IWT) stands as the second biggest driver of species extinction and biodiversity loss (WWF n.d.). In this chapter, IWT is defined as any commercial exploitation of wildlife species (fauna, flora, and fungi), either live or in parts, that is unlawful, and it concerns all activities along the trade chain of a wildlife product from harvest and transport to market exchange and use. Not all wildlife trade is illegal, however, as extensive domestic and international legal frameworks allow for particular types of wildlife trade. The most prominent of such frameworks is the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES). International trade of a species is considered legal if it meets CITES licensing requirements and the species is listed on the convention’s Appendix II or III (trade in Appendix I species is restricted). However, national governments must enact domestic legislation to implement CITES directives but do not always do so, allowing CITES-​protected species trade to occur while banning domestic trade in other species not protected by CITES (Broussard 2017). The main objective of legal frameworks governing wildlife trade is to balance the tradeoff between allowing actors involved in the trade to derive economic benefits and ensuring the survival of wildlife species (Felbab-​Brown 2017).

610    Songkhun Nillasithanukroh et al. Limited legal supplies and rapidly increasing demand for wildlife products, especially in Asia due to rapid economic growth, create opportunities for illegal markets to form and generate large profits. The United Nations Environment Programme estimates the monetary value of IWT at between $50 billion and $150 billion annually (UNEP 2014). The potential monetary gain strongly incentivizes actors, such as poachers and sellers, to supplement legal supplies through illegal means, including for endangered species banned for commercial trade by CITES or domestic regulations (Hsiang and Sekar 2019; Rivalan et al. 2007). Poachers, sellers, and consumers often cross over and operate in both legal and illegal markets (‘t Sas-​Rolfes et al. 2019). Moreover, weak law enforcement, lenient penalties, corruption, and rent-​seeking behavior of officials in the developing world all make IWT activity a high-​reward and low-​risk undertaking (Lin 2005; Felbab-​Brown 2017; Wyatt et al. 2018). Trade is detrimental to species survival and biodiversity when the rate of species extraction exceeds its replacement rate (Mitra and Roy 2006). For instance, more than 56 percent of all turtle species are currently under threat of extinction, with 13,000 metric tons of live turtles being traded, legally and illegally, each year (van Dijk, Stuart, and Rhodin 2000; Ly, Hoang, and Stuart 2011). Although legal trade also depletes species numbers when not properly regulated, illegal trade poses a more consequential threat to endangered species and biodiversity due to the consistent lack of regulation over its supply chains. Given its illicit nature, IWT exists beyond the purview of governing agencies charged with regulating, coordinating, and enforcing laws that moderate the quantity of trade for a particular species (Tittensor et al. 2020). Difficulties in monitoring IWT create uncertainties for regulatory agencies calculating sustainable extraction rates. Lack of illegal trade information leads agencies to underestimate the illegal trade volume and set trade quotas that are too high for trade to be sustainable when combined with the illegal trade (Trouwborst, Loveridge, and Macdonald 2020). Using data on illegal wildlife seizures and legal imports in the United States, Tittensor et al. (2020) find that illegal trade volumes add 28 percent to legal wildlife imports on average, even surpassing the volume of legal import for some species like Green Sea turtles. The substantial volume and covert nature of IWT make it a greater threat to species survival than the legal trade. IWT will thus be the main issue addressed in this chapter. Due to the uncontrolled extraction of species, IWT has driven almost 9,000 individual species to extinction, with wide impacts on broader biomes and human livelihoods (Scheffers et al. 2019). Species within an ecological setting rely on each other for survival, so the elimination of species, especially those that are central and linked to others, weakens and destroys entire ecological communities, undermining biodiversity conservation efforts. This destruction has cascading impacts on the economic welfare and food security of more than 1.6 billion people dependent on forest products, including wildlife (Mayers and Vermeulen 2002). Public health concerns stemming from unregulated trade are also alarming. Wildlife trade, especially for illegally harvested pangolins, was thrust into the spotlight at the onset of the global COVID-​19 pandemic (Mira-​Salama 2020). Scientists have long contended that wildlife trade is conducive to the development of zoonotic diseases that can turn into deadly pandemics. Cross-​species transfers of pathogens are particularly likely in marketplaces that bring various animal species into close proximity with each other and humans. In February 2020, after scientists concluded that the COVID-​19 virus likely originated from a wildlife market in Wuhan, China, Chinese

Illegal Wildlife Trade in the Mekong    611 authorities quickly banned commercial wildlife breeding and trade for food consumption nationwide.2 Given such adverse outcomes from excessive legal and illegal wildlife trade, many argue that hunting and trading endangered species should be banned outright to preserve biodiversity and prevent compounding negative effects (Aryal, Morley, and McLean 2018; EIA 2020). By banning all trade, proponents expect greater difficulties for suppliers in sourcing wildlife and the subsequent low wildlife supply to drive up the price of wildlife products, deterring most consumers. However, the securitization of conservation through enforcement-​first approaches privileges legal and judicial policies and militarization over local livelihoods (Duffy et al. 2019; Duffy and Massé, this volume). Critics of complete bans ask why wildlife welfare is prioritized over that of local communities who rely on wildlife as their sole sources of food consumption and income generation (van Vliet and Mbazza 2011). Without considering primary and cascading human impacts, complete bans are ineffective at conservation because local actors, especially those lacking alternative sources of food and income, will still face incentives to poach and trade in endangered species. Supply restrictions also backfire if the elevated rarity of wildlife products increases demand and incentivizes more poaching (Chen 2016). Increasingly, some form of controlled and well-​enforced legal trade is considered to be a more effective approach for conservation, allowing for sustainable extraction (Rivalan et al. 2007). Yet the current model of legal, regulated wildlife trade frequently allows for excessive hunting and upholds a market for wildlife products that motivates IWT, rubber-​ stamping illegal trade as legal when and where the laws are ambiguous and contain loopholes. To better understand the determinants of IWT in the Mekong region countries and which interventions aid conservation, this chapter examines how certain political economic factors and national legal frameworks originated and how they shape the decisions of various local actors from poachers to law enforcement officers. Although studies find that law enforcement agents have low capacity and lack political will, it is crucial to examine the institutions, laws, and regulations themselves as they are often ambiguous and contain exploitable loopholes, reducing the cost of trafficking and further exacerbating the IWT. Enforcement failures thus follow from ambiguities and gaps in laws and regulations despite officials having the capacity to enforce. Enhancing enforcement capacities may not only fail to reduce IWT but may increase violence in the name of conservation and open up the opportunity for the state to extend its power in controlling valuable resources and the people who depend on them (Peluso 1993; Duffy and Massé, this volume). While this chapter offers a comparative analysis of three countries in the Mekong Basin—​Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos—​the approach of better understanding the political and economic factors and legal institutions that incentivize IWT helps explain the failure of conservation policies globally. Thus, this chapter begins with a brief discussion on the political economy approach used for understanding IWT, followed by a discussion of the actors involved in the illegal trade. Then the chapter turns to the two main approaches to counter IWT. The subsequent section on the ambiguities and loopholes in the wildlife laws and regulations within the Mekong countries draws on interviews with state and non-​state stakeholders in the Mekong. Finally, we conclude by discussing how a comparative political economy lens is not only central to comparative environmental politics, but also helpful for generating recommendations for combating the IWT in the Mekong.

612    Songkhun Nillasithanukroh et al.

Comparative Political Economy Analysis A comparative political economy analysis (PEA) investigates the interactions between political and economic processes within and across societies. This approach first specifies the actors, their resources, and their objectives to delineate the set of actions each actor can make and the payoffs from each. Discussions of IWT are often morally charged, with wildlife poaching seen as an immoral and criminal action, so a political economy approach moves away from explaining the participation of actors in IWT as a result of their disregard of morals (Rizzolo et al. 2017). Instead, this approach illuminates the processes that perpetuate IWT activities across countries by looking at the incentive structures of actors based on their resources and constraints. Political and economic factors determine the resources and the constraints (such as wildlife laws and regulations and poverty) that actors involved in the wildlife market face and thus their incentives to engage in IWT. Their resources and constraints are further shaped by other political economic factors, such as the rent-​seeking behavior of policy-​makers who develop weak laws. PEA, therefore, helps us identify ways to manipulate the incentive structures of policy-​makers such that they are disincentivized from engaging in rent-​seeking behavior. With the appropriate incentive structure, understanding why and how actors engage in IWT can enable policy-​makers to craft feasible interventions at different scales to reduce benefits and increase costs of participating in IWT supply chains.

Actors Involved in the IWT The trade of wildlife products from point of capture to consumption involves four main groups of actors: suppliers, intermediaries, consumers, and enforcement officials. Broadly, suppliers engage in poaching and harvesting, middlemen take part in transporting and trading activities, consumers utilize the end product, and enforcement officials are charged with enforcing regulations. Suppliers, intermediaries, and consumers may operate exclusively in one domain, legal or illegal, or participate in both markets (‘t Sas-​Rolfes et al. 2019). Actors working in the legal market are usually visible to the government, making it easier for governments to monitor and regulate wildlife trade quantities. Facing the risk of legal punishment, actors in the illegal market operate surreptitiously to avoid detection by enforcement officials. This behavior makes it difficult for governments to locate them and effectively regulate their operations to keep wildlife extraction at sustainable rates. Factors that shape an actor’s decision to participate in one market over another can be intertwined, but not always. For instance, high penalties from engaging in IWT increase the likelihood of participation in the legal trade for some actors, but also drive other actors out of the wildlife arena completely and thus have no impact on legal trade participation. Since IWT is a greater concern due to its covert nature, this section discusses the factors that incentivize or deter actors from engaging in IWT.

Illegal Wildlife Trade in the Mekong    613

Suppliers While suppliers are often vilified as profit-​seeking perpetrators of IWT, this group includes a variety of individuals, from poor local hunters poaching for subsistence or cultural practices to professional hunters working for organized crime groups. Poor local farmers are assumed to poach and hunt as a way to supplement their income or dietary needs (Lin 2005). In marginalized communities of Myanmar, Laos, and Cambodia, the sale of wildlife constitutes up to 70 percent of people’s income (Felbab-​Brown 2017). For subsistence hunting, local hunters are less discriminatory in the species they poach and utilize simple hunting traps (MacKenzie 1988). These local hunters either sell wildlife directly to consumers in local markets or to intermediaries who process the wildlife products or sell it to consumers (Nuwer 2018). While many studies emphasize poverty as a critical driver of poaching activities among hunters, some studies point to the high demand of wildlife products as a stronger incentive to hunt (Duffy and St. John 2013). That is, if a hunter is impoverished but there is no demand, the hunter is unlikely to poach for commercial purposes. Furthermore, the notion of conservation carries overtones of colonial repression for many local communities in which the colonizers alienated Indigenous populations, whom they saw as “backward” or “uneducated” and whose traditional resource use patterns they changed in the name of modernization (Fuentes-​George, this volume). Poaching thus becomes a way for locals to rebel against impositions and express discontent with conservation mandates (von Essen and Allen 2015). Under such cases, stronger law enforcement will not necessarily deter these local actors from hunting as they see rules barring them from hunting as illegitimate. High-​profit margins attract professional hunters in organized crime groups to engage in IWT, although this decision is conditioned on the level of perceived enforcement and severity of punishments (Lin 2005). In places with robust law enforcement, prosecution, and long prison sentences, the cost of wildlife trafficking is sufficiently high to deter suppliers from illegally poaching. While professional hunters primarily target charismatic megafauna like elephants and rhinos due to their high value, they still trade in non-​charismatic species (Duffy 2010). Professional hunters utilize sophisticated tools that are more efficient at catching wildlife, and their rampant use has severely reduced populations of endangered species. Accordingly, the simple tools used by local hunters are increasingly ineffective at capturing sufficient quantities of wildlife for dietary or income needs. The well-​equipped professional hunters crowd out local hunters, leading them to relocate to neighboring areas with more abundant wildlife or give up hunting to pursue other occupations (Felbab-​Brown 2017). At the same time, professional hunters occasionally recruit local hunters for their valuable knowledge on endemic species (Saypanya 2018; Nuwer 2018).

Intermediaries Intermediaries between suppliers and consumers serve different functions as part of the illegal wildlife supply chain and include processors, transporters, consolidators, wholesalers, and retailers (‘t Sas-​Rolfes et al. 2019). For instance, intermediaries conveying elephant ivory include processors who carve it into jewelry, transporters who carry it to shops, and

614    Songkhun Nillasithanukroh et al. retailers who sell it to consumers. Processing wildlife through middlemen thus transforms wildlife into products that customers value. The service costs of these middlemen are baked into the market value of wildlife products, meaning that the more hands a wildlife product passes through, the higher its selling price. For example, while a hunter in Tam Dao National Park in Vietnam makes a few hundred dollars in one year from hunting and selling wildlife to intermediaries, the mark-​up in prices through the hands of intermediaries accumulates to the point where restaurants selling those wildlife meats will make around $1,000–​1,500 a year (Felbab-​Brown 2017). Intermediaries are important links in the supply chain and expand the size of the IWT (Felbab-​Brown 2017). Suppliers, especially local hunters, have access to a limited group of consumers in their localities, so intermediaries bring wildlife products to locations with higher demand, such as urban areas where consumers have higher purchasing power. Indeed, roughly 68 percent of the products from the turtle trade in Vietnam end up in its two biggest cities: Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City (Thong et al. 2019). In many large Asian cities, retailers are key to the continued functioning of wildlife trade. They operate out of storefronts to sell legal wildlife products but have been known to sell illegal products to trusted customers. Beyond transporting wildlife, intermediaries also help circumvent legal hurdles. When the trade in some wildlife products is “illegal,” legal forces can curtail their sale, so middlemen cultivate connections with enforcement officials to ferry wildlife products to destinations without getting confiscated. These fixers make sure that park rangers do not arrest hired hunters, police do not inspect transported shipments, and customs officials do not confiscate products crossing borders (‘t Sas-​Rolfes et al. 2019). It is especially easier for fixers to persuade enforcement officials to not enforce wildlife laws in places where officials are minimally paid because bribery is an attractive option for income supplement (Moreto, Brunson, and Braga 2015).

Consumers Although wildlife products are an important source of protein for marginalized communities, consumption by wealthy consumers is more worrisome because they have the financial resources to purchase large quantities of endangered species products, incentivizing IWT to persist and expand (Felbab-​Brown 2017). In many Asian countries, explosive economic and population growth in the 1990s and 2000s led to a sharp rise in demand for wildlife products (Verissimo, Challender, and Nijman 2012). Countries in the Mekong region, such as Vietnam, transitioned into a consumer state, where demand from the domestic population is high, in addition to already being sites for sourcing, processing, and transiting (USAID 2017). East and Southeast Asia have consistently remained the geographic loci of consumption, with 64 percent of the global seizures of illegal wildlife products occurring in the region (Hitchens and Blakeslee 2020). Among more affluent consumers, wildlife products are purchased as traditional medicine, jewelries, pets, and food delicacies (Nijman 2010; Nuwer 2018). These users are often urbanites who buy wildlife products as signals of social status and wealth (USAID 2017). Wildlife products are also consumed due to unsubstantiated beliefs that they have medicinal powers. For example, some wealthy Vietnamese men consume rhino horns as an aphrodisiac, while

Illegal Wildlife Trade in the Mekong    615 postmenopausal Chinese women ease symptoms of rheumatoid arthritis and osteoporosis with tiger bones (USAID 2017). The rarity of the wildlife also attracts affluent purchasers, with price increases doing little to deter customers (Chen 2016). Inelastic demand and high prices incentivize hunters to gather rare species, further decimating wildlife populations. High socioeconomic status among consumers also renders enforcement ineffective; using their financial resources or political clout, these elites can often evade prosecution when they are caught transporting or possessing illegal wildlife products (Wyatt et al. 2018).

Enforcement Officials Besides the actors central to the wildlife trade networks, other critical players include those in the legal and the security arena charged with advancing anti-​trafficking efforts across wildlife law enforcement, customs, prosecution, and judiciary. Deleterious effects from IWT on biodiversity, economies, public health, and national security have led IWT to become highly legalized and securitized (Massé and Margulies 2020). These actors monitor and enforce regulations, meaning the prevalence of IWT depends on their capacities, commitments, and authorities, which vary by location and political context. Officials have weakened capacities and commitments to enforce wildlife laws from two non-​mutually exclusive factors: the lack of resources for capacity-​building and their desire to engage in rent-​seeking behavior (Holland 2016; Kolstad and Søreide 2009). Some wildlife officials intentionally choose to not develop the capacity to enforce or reform wildlife laws in order to continue engaging in corruption and eliciting bribes from actors along the illegal supply chains (Wyatt et al. 2018). Regardless of officials’ inclination toward rent-​seeking, officials often lack economic resources to build enforcement capacities, such as through training in morphology, purchasing appropriate enforcement technology, strengthening legal frameworks, monitoring new online channels of trade, and hiring adequate numbers of officials (Wellsmith 2011; Standaert 2020). The resources and capacities of the suppliers, middlemen, and consumers shape the actions of enforcement officials in curbing wildlife trafficking. When traffickers are capable of bribing, evading, or punishing enforcement officials, the cost of enforcement rises and officials are deterred from enforcing the laws. Only when officials develop enforcement capacity does the cost of IWT rise for traffickers from the higher chance of detection and punishment. Interactions between traffickers and anti-​trafficking forces should be considered strategic, with the actions of each conditioned on the other.

A Political Economy Lens for Understanding Interventions to End IWT To address negative effects from IWT and promote conservation, most interventions tend to fall into two broad categories: institutionalizing complete bans on wildlife trade or permitting regulated wildlife trade with legal frameworks that include monitoring and enforcement. There is no one-​size-​fits-​all solution to IWT, and the solution is often

616    Songkhun Nillasithanukroh et al. context-​dependent (Felbab-​Brown 2017). A success story in one context does not necessarily translate into the same outcomes elsewhere. Thus, we argue that a comparative political economy lens helps explicate why some conservation policies are more successful than others. Here we analyze two main streams of conservation interventions through such a political economy lens.

Complete Ban of Wildlife Hunting and Trade of Endangered Species A complete ban is instituted through national legislation that prohibits all hunting and trading of listed species countrywide. Bans are justified by viewing human poaching activities as morally unacceptable (Neumann 2004). Proponents argue that demand for wildlife products decreases with higher prices due to the absence of constant legal supplies. Furthermore, they posit that without legal markets, the practice of laundering illegal species and passing them off as legal wildlife products will end because enforcement officials will know for certain that the product is illegal, thus increasing hurdles for illegal wildlife traders (Russo 2014). Total bans also raise transaction costs substantially, further deterring actors from engaging in IWT. In places with robust legal enforcement, sellers avoiding detection have to operate discreetly and away from convenient storefronts to provide wildlife products to customers (UNODC 2019). Added secrecy means buyers expend more time and resources to locate wildlife markets and build trust with suppliers. Bans on other human activities like commercial whaling and logging have shown some positive outcomes and some negative ones. The success of bans, like other kinds of wildlife regulation, relies on the will and capacity of enforcement officials to implement laws effectively and to monitor, arrest, and prosecute actors engaged in IWT. To revive depleting whale stocks, the International Whaling Commission (IWC) placed a moratorium on commercial whaling in 1986. Despite notable objections from nations like Norway and Japan, which continued to harvest whales, surveys of whale populations indicate the moratorium succeeded at reviving several whale species. Nevertheless, some scholars suggest that the norm against commercial whaling failed to become globally accepted (Bailey 2008). In Asia-​Pacific, where nations individually imposed logging restrictions, bans failed to uniformly improve forest conservation. Instead, they produced unexpected results such as domestic timber shortage, loss of jobs, and increased deforestation since the underlying problem in some areas was not logging alone but also clearing land for farming (Durst et al. 2001; Brandt et al. 2015). The impact of trade bans on the conservation outcomes of less charismatic endangered species from developing countries remains unknown due to the lack of financial resources to monitor the CITES-​protected populations and their harvest rates (Challender, Harrop, and MacMillan 2015). For megafauna that are well-​monitored, results from hunting and trading bans also show variation. In India, a ban on tiger hunting led to a rise in the tiger population from 2,226 in 2014 to 2,967 in 2018 (BBC 2019). Conversely, the population of Sumatran rhinoceros in Indonesia declined 70 percent in the past two decades with only 80 members surviving today, even under a hunting and trading ban (Bittel 2019). While improved technologies and deterrence activities help curb IWT, their effectiveness varies based on the resources and incentives of the actors involved. Arrests and prosecutions

Illegal Wildlife Trade in the Mekong    617 are more likely to intimidate poachers from marginalized communities who lack the financial or political resources to dodge prosecution. Those connected to organized crime groups, however, are able to bribe or threaten enforcement officials to turn the other way. Under complete bans, interventions such as demand reduction campaigns are able to directly target and reduce consumer demand. Without demand for wildlife products, the financial incentives of poaching and supplying endangered species will likely decline (Duffy and St. John 2013). With fewer transactions between actors, enforcement agencies are able to apply more of their resources on each illegal transaction, thus increasing the likelihood of detection and prosecution. While most demand reduction campaigns use anecdotes rather than consumer research and behavioral theory, one exception is Traffic’s Chi campaign3 that targets rhino horn demand in Vietnam (‘t Sas-​Rolfes et al. 2019). Consumer research found that young, wealthy businessmen living in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City are the primary consumers of rhino horn, so campaigns targeted this core group by promoting the idea that success and masculinity come from an individual’s character rather than from rhino horn (TRAFFIC 2014). While follow-​up research is needed to measure the Chi campaign’s impact on rhino poaching, preliminary surveys found that 64 percent of respondents would recommend others to stop consuming rhino horn (Offord-​Woolley 2016). In addition to complete national bans, many governments have opted to ban wildlife poaching in specific locations through protected areas (PAs). PAs are regions reserved for conservation that receive formal safeguards from local, national, and even international authorities; here, hunting is banned outright or for select endangered species, with violators facing legal penalties (Büscher and Whande 2007). Yet an evaluation of PAs finds that only around 20–​50 percent of the PAs globally are managed effectively (Watson et al. 2014). While total government control over natural resource extraction, such as in state-​ controlled PAs, can improve biodiversity metrics, it may also result in environmental injustices where local communities bear the majority of the costs of resource extraction while being excluded from its benefits (Fuentes-​George, this volume). Local communities living near PAs are usually economically and politically marginalized, making it easier for officials to repress and exclude them from accessing natural resources and participating in the distribution of those resources. Some PAs also became sites of violence under an enforcement-​first approach where officials implementing laws are militarized and authorized to use force against illegal poachers (Duffy and Massé, this volume). If establishing PAs deprives local actors of their income and diet source, the cost of not poaching becomes higher than the cost of noncompliance with wildlife hunting bans. Studies have shown that the PAs most successful in deterring poaching have mechanisms in place to support the interests and livelihoods of marginalized communities living within and near protected areas (King, Biggs, and Loon 2007). Furthermore, for PAs to achieve conservation goals, they have to also be sufficiently staffed, with enforcement officials who have the capacity to monitor, detect, and enforce bans on wildlife hunting (Wellsmith 2011). Officials require tools and technologies to help detect illegal activities within the PAs, such as vehicles, drones, and thermal cameras to pinpoint unauthorized hunters (Wellsmith 2011; López and Mulero-​Pázmány 2019). Genomic technology, such as DNA barcoding, is also useful in identifying wildlife species and their origin (Gupta 2018). Yet militarized parked rangers armed with heavy weaponry can generate violence against vulnerable populations, reducing their voice and exacerbating the

618    Songkhun Nillasithanukroh et al. inequalities they face, while modern technologies create openings for new private-​sector actors and security companies (Duffy et al. 2019; see Duffy and Massé, this volume). Well-​equipped PA officials more credibly raise the risk of getting caught, thus deterring illegal poaching. In reality, however, government environmental agencies typically have modest budgets and limited personnel, meaning many teams cannot purchase the necessary equipment for effective monitoring and enforcement (Felbab-​Brown 2017). Lack of equipment not only fails to deter illegal actors, but also decreases the incentives for enforcement officials to do their job. Without essential equipment, these officials assume they will be unable to detect violations, and, even if they do, the evidence will not be robust enough for successful prosecution (Saypanya 2018). In turn, they may decide not to enforce.

Regulating Trade of Endangered Species A second group of interventions works under the assumption that legal wildlife trade is permitted.4 Supporters of regulated wildlife trade argue that complete bans fuel poaching by heightening the rarity of certain species and their value to consumers (Rivalan et al. 2007). Instead, regulated trade may give actors an economic stake in the preservation of species, aligning conservation with the interests of various actors in wanting to benefit from wildlife. Communities may be less likely to extract wildlife beyond its sustainable rate to ensure future income flows (Cooney et al. 2015). In addition, providing some income-​ generating opportunities may lead local communities to support enforcement of limits on wildlife trade (Peterson 2015; see also Fuentes-​George, this volume). Under arrangements where access to wildlife is limited to a community and locals can monitor and credibly punish extraction from outsiders or overextraction by community members, they will be more likely to comply with hunting regulations (Ostrom 1990). However, ensuring exclusive community access is often extremely difficult, as is enforcing quotas and limits on wildlife extraction. Approaches such as community-​based natural resource management (CBNRM) can afford politically and economically marginalized locals access to resources by devolving property or resource rights to local communities and providing assistance to deter outsider poaching (Agrawal and Ostrom 1999). For instance, governments can establish conservancies where local communities are granted authority to manage specific parcels of land and establish rules for wildlife extraction and monetization. In Namibia, the successful devolution of property rights led to communal conservancies that allowed locals to generate continuous flows of income from trophy hunting, meat harvesting, live game sales, and ecotourism while fostering the elephant population to rise from 7,500 in 1995 to 20,000 in 2012 (Naidoo et al. 2016; Weaver and Petersen 2008). As noted earlier, evidence from the management of common pool resources suggests that successful preservation of wildlife is not guaranteed and depends on the number of users, the ability to limit access to designated users, and the divergence of community interests (Ostrom 1990; Agrawal and Ostrom 1999). For instance, when the “community” is fractured with actors having incompatible interests, local buy-​in is tough. People living around the Maasai Mara National Reserve in Kenya, who own large numbers of cattle and livestock, view forest conservation less favorably and prefer not to actively support conservancies due to their loss of grazing land (Keane et al. 2016). Different interests among community

Illegal Wildlife Trade in the Mekong    619 members lead to noncompliance from those with livestock, thus generating failures in achieving conservation objectives. Beyond regulated hunting, wildlife products also come from biosynthetics and captive-​ breeding facilities such as wildlife farms. Breeding and selling wildlife through facilities and manufacturing artificial facsimiles reduce pressure on wild species by competing with black market supplies (Bulte and Damania 2005). Farmed species are expected to decrease profits for illegal poachers, reducing their incentives to keep poaching. Still, the use of farming to conserve wild species has yielded mixed outcomes thus far. For instance, introducing porcupine farming in Vietnam did not lead to an increase in the wild porcupine population in the first decade of the 2000s (Brooks, Roberton, and Bell 2010). Farmed porcupines fetched higher prices compared to wild-​caught porcupines, so large-​volume buyers of porcupines, such as restaurants, continued to source wild porcupine meat illegally. Conversely, crocodile farming since the 1980s has supplied the crocodile skin market to the point that the most commercially valuable species are the least threatened with extinction, leading populations of wild crocodiles to flourish globally (Felbab-​Brown 2017). Among wealthy wildlife consumers globally, however, farmed species are not perfect substitutes for wild-​caught species, as the rarity of wild species is exactly what attracts them (Chen 2016). Subsequently, the demand for wild-​caught species persists, incentivizing poachers to continue hunting illegally for profits. Wildlife farms also open up the opportunity to launder wildlife, whereby illegally caught wildlife species are passed off as legally farmed species (Krishnasamy and Zavagli 2020). For regulated trade to function, a system of certifications and permits is necessary to authorize the transfer of wildlife products after species are legally procured. This trail of certifications should begin at the point of origin, where experts sign off on documents identifying the species and confirming the legality of the sourcing sites. Point-​of-​origin certification allows enforcement officials at checkpoints to permit legal wildlife to move undisrupted through supply chains from hunters to consumers. This information reduces downstream costs of enforcement, as officials do not have to distinguish between legal and illegal species. Moreover, the certification process requires enforcement officials to have the capacity to identify and differentiate species at points of origin, as well as the administrative capacity to process documents (Tröster and Hiete 2018). Certification systems often fail at imposing costs on actors along the IWT supply chains when officials lack training, including advanced morphology, on which species are on protected lists and inadvertently issue trade documents for endangered species. For example, the morphological similarity between the commonly bred Chinese Golden Coin turtle (Cuora trifasciata) and the rare Vietnamese Three-​striped Box turtle (Cuora cyclornata) creates confusion among permit officials in Vietnam, who mistakenly issue trade permits for the endangered species (McCormack 2019).

Governing Wildlife Trade in the Mekong Weak enforcement of wildlife laws and regulations at the national level is consistently treated as the key issue shaping the incentives of actors along wildlife supply chains and their decisions to engage in IWT and the reason interventions fail to achieve expected results

620    Songkhun Nillasithanukroh et al. (Wellsmith 2011). Corruption, informational gaps, and lack of resources within government ministries are often cited as key contributors to weak enforcement, but one underexamined factor is the national legal frameworks governing wildlife trade (van Uhm and Moreto 2018; Felbab-​Brown 2017; Wyatt et al. 2018). While countries in the Mekong region joined CITES in the 1990s and 2000s (Vietnam in 1994, Cambodia in 1997, and Laos in 2004) and passed legislation to monitor legal trade and prohibit illegal trade, the effectiveness of their CITES compliance efforts and their attempts to curtail IWT in the region remain mixed. This section raises several issues with the existing legal framework in countries of the Mekong region. The structure of the legal frameworks of Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam directly and indirectly impacts enforcement of the IWT, thus affecting conservation outcomes.

Loopholes in Legal Trade Regulation Wildlife laundering is widespread throughout the Mekong region, where legal wildlife trade is permitted. The frameworks governing legal trade in Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam unintentionally allow for laundering whereby illegally sourced wildlife is passed off as legal (Krishnasamy and Zavagli 2020). Wildlife breeders may use captive breeding facilities to introduce wild-​caught endangered species into the trade. Farm owners typically have permits allowing them to legally sell captive-​bred species, but instead of selling captive-​bred species, breeders supplement their supplies with wild-​caught species. Laws in these countries do not explicitly forbid wildlife laundering and do not charge breeding facility owners with specific penalties for engaging in laundering, making enforcement and prosecution difficult and thus opening a loophole for traffickers to exploit. Institutional redundancy, whereby multiple agencies within the same jurisdiction publish contradicting laws, also contributes to the formation of a loophole. Species allowed to be farmed by one agency but not another allow breeders to claim that they are not breaking laws based on the former agency’s regulations. Wildlife laundering is attractive when the cost of breeding is high or successful breeding is uncertain (Felbab-​Brown 2017). Proprietors of captive breeding facilities also manipulate and forge permits, enabling them to trade larger quantities than would be officially permitted. Upon inspection, enforcement officials lack the ability to differentiate between wild-​caught and captive-​bred species or are bribed to accept false permits (ENV Staff 2019). Opportunities to launder wildlife also incentivize poachers and organized crime groups to keep hunting endangered species because they can be disguised and moved to consumers with less risk of legal consequences. One reason loopholes persist is that they reinforce the rent-​seeking behavior of legislative officials and weak political will among national authorities to develop explicit regulations forbidding wildlife laundering and specific penalties for such acts, due to the ability to extract large amounts of money from the illegal wildlife businesses (Krishnasamy and Zavagli 2020). Even without the desire to extract bribes, low political will also lead governments to underinvest in enforcement and strengthening of the capacity of officials to combat the loopholes. As such, legal loopholes have turned these three countries into prime source and transit locations, where illegal species are laundered through breeding facilities as wildlife ready for legal trade. In Laos, Article 40 of the Wildlife and Aquatic Law (2007) includes a provision that allows species to be traded if they are second-​generation or later. There is no way to monitor

Illegal Wildlife Trade in the Mekong    621 and enforce this requirement, so breeding facilities pass off wild-​caught species as captive-​ bred. A recent survey of bear farms in Laos found 121 Asiatic black bears in 11 commercial facilities claimed as second-​generation captive-​bred, but evidence of snare marks and missing limbs suggested all bears were wild-​caught or imported illegally (Livingstone and Shepherd 2016). In Cambodia, Articles 96 and 97 of the Forestry Law (2002) prohibit breeding and trading of wildlife species with protected status in Cambodia, including indigenous species. However, breeding facilities for non-​native species are used to launder native species. For example, in more than 200 crocodile farms across Cambodia claiming to breed non-​native species, many launder native Siamese crocodiles, which are protected under law, and sell them as legally tradable (Daltry and Thorbjarnarson 2004). Vietnam permits trade in species that are second-​generation or later and are listed in CITES Appendix I or Group IB on Decree 06/​2019/​ND-​CP. For species listed on CITES Appendices II/​III or Group IIB of Decree 06/​2019/​ND-​CP, first-​generation species can be traded. Like Laos and Cambodia, Vietnamese laws allow wild species to be traded “legally” by obtaining permits and declaring them captive-​bred. Many turtle farms in Vietnam illegally pass off wild-​caught turtles as captive bred by forging false permits that obscure the identity and quantity of facility bred turtles, thereby funneling large quantities of endangered turtles into international markets (ENV 2019).

Overlap in Jurisdiction Establishing several agencies with the jurisdiction to monitor, regulate, and enforce wildlife laws and regulations can serve conservation purposes by yielding greater oversight and compliance, with actors working illegally needing to evade more enforcement officials (Bagashka 2014). However, overlapping agencies also serve the rent-​seeking goals of government officials, where redundant jurisdictions open more opportunities for bribe extraction (Amin and Soh 2020). These redundancies develop inadvertently when agencies are asked to confront different but overlapping problems or through regulations written by bureaucrats with incomplete information on the issues. Overlaps in responsibilities generate confusion among agencies about what roles each should play in monitoring protected areas, arresting traffickers, and regulating captive breeding facilities. Such confusion leads to inaction, room for plausible deniability, and opportunities to blame others. If agencies fail to coordinate and distinguish their enforcement responsibilities, they may not increase the cost of engaging in IWT or the likelihood of detecting violations. Moreover, jurisdictional overlaps complicate processes for legal trade. To engage in legal breeding and trading, facilities need permits from several regulatory agencies, raising costs of legal trade and encouraging breeders to avoid compliance. In Vietnam, overlaps in institutional jurisdictions remain a challenge in the enforcement of wildlife laws and regulations. The Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development (MARD) serves as the management authority in charge of CITES implementation, yet a second ministry established in 2002, the Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment (MoNRE), also protects wildlife species that overlap with MARD’s lists. The double-​ listing, specifically on MoNRE’s Decree No. 160/​2013/​ND-​CP and MARD’s Decree No. 06/​ 2019/​ND-​CP, creates confusion and ambiguity for local authorities and law enforcement

622    Songkhun Nillasithanukroh et al. agencies (Nguyen 2010). When traffickers are arrested with a protected species listed on both decrees, local law enforcement has difficulty deciding which regulation to enforce, leading to mishandled cases that fail to hold illegal traffickers accountable. Owners of breeding facilities are required to obtain separate permits to breed, transport, and import/​ export protected species from both MARD and MoNRE if species are listed on their respective decrees. The redundancy in legal requirements proves cumbersome, leading owners to ignore mandates (USAID Saving Species 2017). Pursuing legal cases against violators is made more complicated by the need to build cases in concert with MARD and MoNRE as prosecutors must use two different systems of administrative records and data-​keeping. The jurisdictional overlaps appear to result from the lack of a coordinating body overseeing institutional design. While MARD was created with the goal of developing agricultural regulations, MoNRE was tasked with resource conservation. Wildlife farms sit at the intersection of their responsibilities. When charged with developing regulations to meet the goals assigned to their ministries, each ministry unintentionally created lists of protected species that overlapped. Unfortunately, personality issues among the leadership and institutional competition for fiscal resources have prevented the two agencies from resolving these problems effectively (UNDP 2016). Jurisdictional overlaps are also common in Laos and Cambodia. In both countries, two different departments have authority over enforcement of conservation laws and wildlife crime investigations. For instance, in Laos, the Department of Forest Inspection (DoFI), created in 2008, is in charge of all wildlife crime investigations, despite the Laos Customs Department maintaining command over cases of international wildlife smuggling (UNODC 2014). When customs officials confiscate shipments of illegal wildlife, they defer to DoFI because DoFI has authority over all investigations regarding wildlife. Yet, due to its inexperience in criminal investigation, DoFI refers back to customs which has expertise and experience in dealing with international organized crime. Similarly, in Cambodia, while the Forestry Administration (FA) within the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry, and Fisheries (MAFF) is the primary agency that enforces forestry laws and regulations across Cambodia, the General Department of Administration of Nature Conservation and Protection (GDANCP) within the Ministry of Environment (MoE) manages PAs (UNODC 2015). When illegal poaching occurs in PAs, both agencies are able to arrest actors suspected of hunting and possessing protected species and to conduct initial investigations, in addition to being able to refer cases to prosecutors. This overlap leads to inaction and paralysis over who should initiate investigations. Moreover, this approach creates confusion for those wanting to report wildlife crimes because they do not know which department has the authority to investigate.

Mismatches in the Legal Status of Species Across Countries Discrepancies in laws between countries impede enforcement of wildlife trade laws and conservation, highlighting the tension between countries’ inability to harmonize domestic legislation with international environmental agreements. While CITES appendices guide the species protection lists for member states, CITES cannot force countries to collectively pass legislation protecting all listed species (Lin 2005). The consequence of lack of

Illegal Wildlife Trade in the Mekong    623 enforcement power by CITES means that domestic lists across member states may not match (Broussard 2017). Domestic wildlife laws often focus on indigenous species and leave out non-​native CITES species, attaching penalties only to the trafficking of domestically protected species. This generates a loophole where wildlife trade is illegal in the country of origin but legal in the destination country (Broussard 2017). When poaching and trading bans for particular species are not uniform across countries, species may not be conserved effectively. For example, there are no penalties for possessing non-​native CITES species in Thailand (TRAFFIC 2016). This allows non-​native CITES species protected under the domestic laws of Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam to be sold legally in Thailand. Based on 12 surveys carried out between 2004 and 2013, almost half of the 2,500 tortoises and freshwater turtles found in Chatuchak Market in Bangkok were banned from international trade through CITES (TRAFFIC 2016). Legal trade for endangered species in one country creates incentives for poachers in countries with bans to continue hunting as they can be sold elsewhere. Poachers in the Mekong countries may thus hunt endangered turtle species and illegally sell domestically protected turtle species to intermediaries who transport them to neighboring Thailand. As such, strengthening legal protections for certain endangered species in one nation does not sufficiently conserve them in the absence of uniform legal protection for all CITES species across other countries.

Conclusion Identifying actors and their incentives along the illegal wildlife supply chain allows us to better understand how IWT persists and target interventions to curb it. As this chapter shows, utilizing a comparative PEA reveals political and economic factors contributing to weak enforcement and noncompliance of the actors involved in IWT. Such factors include the poverty of local hunters, wealth of urban consumers, low wages for enforcement agents, and opportunities for corruption. Moreover, this chapter highlights the role of existing legal institutions in weakening conservation efforts through legal loopholes, ambiguous laws, and overlapping institutional mandates that intentionally or unintentionally support IWT. These legal issues arise from policy-​makers and enforcement officials attempting to institutionalize an environment that supports rent-​seeking behavior. Without changing the incentive structures of those in charge of anti-​trafficking efforts, it will be difficult to close loopholes and implement effective enforcement. Even with well-​intentioned policy-​makers, incomplete information can lead to institutional designs where multiple agencies are tasked with overlapping objectives and given enforcement power in overlapping jurisdictions. Competition between some agencies further entrenches the problem of overlapping jurisdictions. Problems with legal frameworks also persist because legislators allocate minimal resources and effort to solving them because they do not prioritize wildlife trafficking or see it as a threat to national welfare. Limited resources generate weak capacity that bars effective enforcement. Finally, the lack of cross-​national coordination on assigning similar legal protection to species leaves open a loophole that allows illegal wildlife suppliers to easily travel to neighboring countries to sell endangered species with minimal impediments.

624    Songkhun Nillasithanukroh et al. A comparative environmental politics of the illegal trade of wildlife must take into account how domestic institutional structures provide incentives for actors to circumvent efforts to regulate wildlife trafficking both within countries and across borders. A clause to protect wildlife breeders may end up providing opportunities for actors to engage in illicit wildlife trading and contribute to weak enforcement since actors will have incentives to overlook what is apparently a legal form of trade. While other scholars have highlighted asymmetries of power and violence that accompany and hinder conservation efforts, an analysis across supply chains highlights how power asymmetries and interests vary depending on where actors lie along these chains. To reduce IWT, we propose several recommendations. First, countries in the Mekong region should coordinate to legally protect all species listed on CITES appendices and adopt similar domestic restrictions and penalties for IWT participation. Disparate sets of regulations between nations coupled with advances in transportation technology have opened up opportunities for traffickers to move wildlife products to places where suppliers and intermediaries are able to sell illegal products lawfully or with less severe penalties. The pull from nearby markets allows IWT to persist across the region. Once each country legally safeguards CITES-​protected species similarly with strong punishment for illegal hunting and poaching, poachers will face hurdles in finding nearby markets to sell poached wildlife, thereby reducing the benefits of initiating IWT activities. Second, all Mekong states should develop additional enforcement capacity through additional staffing and rigorous training. If enforcement officials are able to identify the majority of those engaging in illegal hunting and trade, arrest and prosecute them, and impose sentences proportional to their crimes, the high participation costs relative to the benefits will deter potential poachers. Finally, Mekong countries should develop restrictive regulations and improve enforcement of captive breeding facilities. Wildlife laundering can be reduced with stricter regulations that call for stronger proof of species origin and the use of new technologies that help officials distinguish captive-​bred from wild-​caught species.

Notes 1. As noted by Felbab-​Brown (2017), demand within the United States for illegal wildlife products, such as those that constitute traditional Chinese medicine, is particularly high among East and Southeast Asian communities in the country. 2. According to the Wildlife Conservation Society, the language of the law does not prohibit the trade in wildlife for medicine or research interests (WCS 2020). 3. Traffic’s Chi campaign created public service messages to directly target groups of primary users identified through consumer research to instill the value that success does not come from the consumption of illegal wildlife products (https://​www.traf​fi c.org/​news/​ inn​ovat​ive-​campa​ign-​promo​tes-​succ​ess-​from-​wit​hin/​). 4. Although CITES does not allow commercial trade of all species listed on Appendix I, domestic laws governing protected species vary between countries. It is up to individual countries to choose which Appendix I species to list on their domestic lists of protected species. As such, the commercial trade of endangered species on Appendix I remains legal domestically even if it is illegal internationally.

Illegal Wildlife Trade in the Mekong    625

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Illegal Wildlife Trade in the Mekong    629 Verissimo, D., D. W. S. Challender, and V. Nijman. “Wildlife Trade in Asia: Start with the Consumer.” Asian Journal of Conservation Biology 1, no. 2 (2012): 49–​50. von Essen, E., and M. P. Allen. “Reconsidering Illegal Hunting as a Crime of Dissent: Implication for Justice and Deliberative Uptake.” Criminal Law and Philosophy 11, no. 2 (2015): 213–​228. Watson, J. E. M., N. Dudley, D. B. Segan, and M. Hockings, “The Performance and Potential of Protected Areas.” Nature 515, no. 7525 (2014): 67–​73. WCS. “WCS Statement and Analysis: On the Chinese Government’s Decision Prohibiting Some Trade and Consumption of Wild Animals.” WCS Newsroom. February 29, 2020. https://​newsr​oom.wcs.org/​News-​Relea​ses/​arti​cleT​ype/​Arti​cleV​iew/​articl​eId/​13855/​WCS-​ Statem​ent-​and-​Analy​sis-​On-​the-​Chin​ese-​Gove​rnme​nts-​Decis​ion-​Proh​ibit​ing-​S ome-​ Trade-​and-​Cons​umpt​ion-​of-​Wild-​Anim​als.aspx Weaver, L. C., and T. Petersen. “Namibia Communal Area Conservancies.” Best Practices in Sustainable Hunting (2008): 48–​52. Wellsmith, M. “Wildlife Crime: The Problems of Enforcement.” European Journal on Criminal Policy and Research 17, no. 2 (2011): 125–​148. WWF. “Illegal Wildlife Trade.” World Wildlife Fund. n. d. Retrieved January 11, 2021. https://​ www.worldw​ildl​ife.org/​thre​ats/​ille​gal-​wildl​ife-​trade WWF. “Illegal Wildlife Trade in the Greater Mekong.” World Wildlife Fund. 2020. https://​ greate​rmek​ong.panda.org/​chall​enge​s_​in​_​the​_​gre​ater​_​mek​ong/​ille​gal_​wild​life​_​tra​de2/​ Wyatt, T., K. Johnson, L. Hunter, R. George, and R. Gunter. “Corruption and Wildlife Trafficking: Three Case Studies Involving Asia.” Asian Journal of Criminology 13, no. 1 (2018): 35–​55.

Pa rt V I I

T H E P OL I T IC S OF E N E RG Y T R A N SI T ION S

Chapter 33

F racked Tax paye rs and C omm u ni t i e s

Shale Economics in the US and Argentina Shanti Gamper-​R abindran In the United States, which pioneered the shale industry, and in Argentina, which is hyped as the next shale frontier in emerging economies, the oil and gas industry and its progeny, the shale industry, have enjoyed staunch support from political, financial, and legal institutions (Gamper-​Rabindran 2017; Gamper-​Rabindran 2022). This institutional support has enabled the externalization of the economic, public health, and environmental costs to American and Argentinian societies. Shale operations have also externalized climate costs to the world through methane leaks from shale operations and natural gas pipelines, and through the intentional venting and flaring of gas in shale oil operations1 (Worden et al. 2017; Alvarez et al. 2018). The entrenched support highlights the enormous challenges to reforming the political, legal, and financial institutions to incentivize the energy transition away from the oil and gas sector. Understanding how these institutions support the shale sector is the first step in their reform and is the focus of this chapter. The federal governments in the United States and Argentina, and many US state governments and Argentinian provincial governments, support shale extraction as a strategy to secure energy and promote economic development. However, even before the COVID-​19 pandemic, in 2019, there were already ample signs that the debt-​financed shale sector, financed by private investors in the United States and by taxpayers in Argentina was not independently financially viable. The shale sector expanded rapidly in the early 2000s, despite tremendous costs on local communities’ livelihoods, their health, and the environment2 (Finkel 2015; Jackson et al. 2014; Moore et al. 2014; Vengosh et al. 2014; Gamper-​ Rabindran 2017; Neville 2017; Ladd 2018; Gamper-​Rabindran 2022) and because US and Argentinian laws favor a regulatory structure that privileges those extracting oil and gas over those who suffer from negative spillovers. As a result, those local governments and local communities in the United States and Argentina that are opposed to the shale industry have limited legal recourse to restrain shale extraction. These comparative observations from the United States and Argentina—​that the industry externalized financial costs to investors and taxpayers and that governance institutions externalized public health and environment costs to society—​raise doubts

634   Shanti Gamper-Rabindran on whether the industry, if forced to internalize these costs, is viable. Notably, while the US shale industry is privately owned and the Argentina shale industry is spearheaded primarily by a partially publicly owned company, in both cases taxpayers bore the financial costs of supporting the industry, albeit through different channels, as described later. These observations implore reform of these institutions and research into how to achieve these reforms.

The US Shale Industry The US shale industry began to gain traction by 2005 and ramped up production between 2006 and 2019. It produced an enormous amount of oil and gas, generated royalties for owners of mineral leases, provided tax revenue to the federal and state governments, and provided jobs for workers (Mason 2015). A 2014 study by the Congressional Budget Office estimated that the shale development would increase the US gross domestic product by about two-​thirds of 1 percent in 2020 (Congressional Budget Office 2014). Another study estimates economic benefits (excluding environmental costs) from shale gas extraction from 2007 to 2013 alone were approximately$74 billion per year (Hausman and Kellogg 2015). The shale boom created an estimated 500,000 (Maniloff and Mastromonaco 2017) to 640,000 jobs, or 0.43 percent of US employment during the Great Recession (Feyrer et al. 2017). In 2019, the United States produced 25.3 trillion cubic feet of dry shale gas, amounting to 75 percent of its total dry natural gas production that year (US Energy Information Administration 2020a). It also produced 2.81 billion barrels of oil from tight oil3 resources, amounting to 63 percent of total US crude oil production in 2019 (US Energy Information Administration 2020b). Despite these contributions, local economies reliant on the shale sector have faced boom and bust cycles as companies tighten their focus on specific basins, as regional gas prices fell as early as 2012 and global oil prices fell in mid-​2014, and as the industry struggled to regain its footing (Jacquet 2014; Schafft et al. 2018; Christopherson 2015; Luhavalja 2019). The production growth in the shale oil and gas industry belies the shaky financial foundations of the industry, including the need for drilling more and operating more wells to keep up production (Elliot 2019).

The US Shale Industry’s Poor Financial Performance By mid-​2019, shale companies’ poor financial outlook and failing debt-​financed growth was widely acknowledged by investors and energy experts. An analysis of 34 North American shale-​focused oil and gas producers revealed that, from 2009 through 2019, they spent $189 billion more on drilling and other capital expenses than they generated from the sale of oil and gas (Williams-​Derry et al. 2020). Banks and traditional shale investors cut off credit lines, and, in turn, shale companies slashed production, leading to an acceleration in the number of shale companies declaring bankruptcy.4 In January 2020, North American oil and gas companies were estimated to hold $200 billion of debt that would mature by 2024, with $40 billion of that debt coming due in 2020 (Dezember 2020).

Fracked Taxpayers and Communities     635 Notably, the poor financial performance of the shale industry predated COVID-​19 and plagued companies of various sizes across the shale industry, from major oil and gas conglomerates, to both large and small independent companies. In 2019, Chevron took $10 billion write-​downs on their assets, including shale assets (Meyer 2019). Analysts also urged Exxon to take a full write-​down of the $30 billion it had paid for the shale company XTO (Nair et al. 2019), and Exxon admitted it had overpaid for XTO (Luhavalja 2019). Chevron and Shell, which had purchased shale companies in the Marcellus Shale in 2010/​2011, subsequently sold off these assets at fire sale prices in 2019 (Post Gazette 2019). Also in 2019, the shale pioneer Chesapeake Energy admitted in its quarterly filings “substantial doubt about [its] ability to continue as a going concern,” sparking the anticipation of its imminent declaration of bankruptcy (Adams-​Heard et al. 2019). Other large independent companies were unable to generate positive cash flows, as demanded by investors (Hipple et al. 2019), while a growing number filed bankruptcies5 (Adams-​Heard et al. 2019; Haynes and Boone LLP 2020).

The Debt-​Financed Shale Companies Debt financing of an industry can be a legitimate financial strategy, provided that the industry becomes financially viable and the opportunity costs of those funds are accounted for. Shale companies relied on a debt-​financed strategy, but many failed to achieve financial sustainability even before COVID-​19 struck the global economy. The companies borrowed heavily to drill new wells to keep up the production treadmill as the output of shale wells declined quickly (Elliot 2019). Companies also borrowed to buy more acreage, not only to lock in promising reservoirs, but to buoy the companies’ perceived value to attract investors (Loderby 2012). Shale sector investors that bought into the hype of the next energy revolution rushed in to finance the shale sector. Major oil and gas companies also swooped into shale basins, acquiring smaller shale companies (Meyer 2019; Krauss 2019). Private equity investors made profits by flipping companies sold to larger public companies (McLean 2020). Capital continued to flow into the shale sector despite warnings from some energy experts about the industry’s shaky financial foundations. Shale companies did not generate positive cash flows even oil high oil prices, at $100 per barrel in early 2014 (Curtis 2015). In mid-​2014, global oil prices crashed (Kilian 2015). Separately, regional gas prices also declined due to oversupply and the inability to move gas to markets (Krauss 2019). In 2015, Steve Schlotterbeck, former CEO of shale behemoth EQT, called the shale industry an “unmitigated disaster for the buy/​hold investor” (Richards 2019). Similarly, in 2015, hedge fund manager David Einhorn6 announced that, according to his analysis, 16 publicly traded shale producers from 2006 to 2014 spent $80 billion more than they received from selling oil and that companies could stay afloat only with the infusion of capital (Foley 2015; Crooks 2015). In 2017, Wall Street widely acknowledged poor returns to investors and urged the shale companies to shift strategies to produce profits, rather than channel funds into production (Olson and Cook 2017). Between the start of 2015 and September 2018, shale companies with a combined debt of $171.2 billion filed for bankruptcy protection (Dezember 2020). Despite these warning signs, investors continued to finance the sector (Dezember 2020). Private equity firms were able to raise nearly $200 billion between 2014 and 2017 to buy oil

636   Shanti Gamper-Rabindran and gas assets. These investments, justified as buying on the cheap, turned out to perform poorly (Dezember 2020).

Losers from the Debt-​Financing Strategy The shale sector has imposed significant losses on investors, including hedge funds, banks, pension funds, and private equity shareholders (McLean 2020). While sophisticated investors choose investments based on their appetite for risks and returns, average Americans who have their nest eggs in pension or retirement funds cannot direct where their money is invested. A number of pension and retirement funds have channeled funds into hedge funds that hold energy debts and into private equity firms that, in turn, invested billions into shale companies (McLean 2018a). These pension and retirement funds suffered losses from these investments. For instance, a 2020 study documented that fracking companies in the New York State Common Retirement Fund (NYSCRF) portfolio lost 33 percent of their market value between March 31, 2019, and February 3, 2020, a month before the oil and stock market crashed (350.org 2020). Media reports also detail how a pension fund filed a lawsuit against private equity fund Silver Run II, which raised $1 billion and that invested in shale company Alta Mesa Resources Inc. Alta Mesa turned out to be valued at $43 million. The pension fund alleged the private equity fund provided misleading information and overstated earnings and production estimates (Bohnen 2019; Matthews 2019). The shale sector was able to attract capital for at least three reasons. First, investors are willing to take the risks. Second, management teams at private equity companies and financial companies derive fees from these transactions and thus face incentives to channel capital from investors to shale companies, regardless of returns on investment (Mclean 2018a). For instance, Chesapeake Energy sold $16.4 billion of stock and $15.5 billion of debt, and paid Wall Street $1.1 billion in fees (Mclean 2018a). Third, the shale sector presented a misleadingly rosy picture of its prospects. In her 2018 book Saudi America, Bethany McLean described how the industry pitched break-​even figures, claiming it could extract oil and gas for a profit at low prices, while analyses of the financial sheets showed companies were in the red (McLean 2018b). She also revealed how companies overstated their shale gas reserves, reporting larger reserves to investors than to the Securities and Exchange Commission. In January 2019, the Wall Street Journal published their analysis showing consistent, sizable overestimates of output projections from shale wells (Olson et al. 2019).

Taxpayers’ Subsidy of the Shale Industry While private investors have provided the upfront financing for the shale sector, taxpayers fund the industry through government subsidies to the shale industry and its related industrial complex (for an analysis of the politics around the distribution of revenues from fossil fuels, including subsidies, see Al-​Suwaidan and Mazaheri, this volume). Oil and gas companies enjoy tax preferences as compared to the standard tax treatment of US companies; those tax preferences cost US taxpayers about $4 billion annually (Congressional Budget Office 2013; Metcalf 2018). State governments have granted generous tax relief to lure

Fracked Taxpayers and Communities     637 petrochemical factories to locate in their states, justifying this move as necessary to absorb the gas glut (Sicotte and Joyce 2017). For instance, the state of Pennsylvania granted Shell an estimated $1.6 billion in tax relief for locating its plant in southwestern Pennsylvania (Corkery 2019) and enacted legislation to grant similar packages to other proposed petrochemical plants (Legere 2020). This strategy is imprudent when some analysts warn of global oversupply of petrochemicals, when the chemical divisions of oil and gas companies face losses, and when plans for petrochemical plants in the US Gulf Coast (where the industry is well-​established) have been shelved7 (Robertson 2016; Crooks 2017; Kunkel 2019; Pooler 2020). Taxpayers are also on the hook to pay for reclamation of abandoned wells as cash-​ strapped shale companies have ended production and continue to leave wells unplugged. Federal and state governments failed to secure adequate financial bonds at the start of the operations to cover the costs of capping and cleanup. Estimates of outstanding liabilities for reclamation for wells on federal lands alone (excluding the many more wells on private lands and state lands) range from $46 million to $333 million (Rusco et al. 2019).

The Argentinian Shale Industry Argentina shifted from being a net exporter of oil and gas to a major importer of gas by 2011 and net importer of oil and gas by 2013 (Fernández González et al. 2019). The country faced declining output in the conventional oil and gas sector in the Argentinian provinces of Neuquén8 and Rio Negro (Bernáldez and Herrera 2020). Hopes for shale to emerge as the new oil and gas frontier rose with Repsol-​YPF’s announcement of discoveries of shale gas and shale oil in Neuquén province in 2010 and 2011 (Bernáldez and Herrera 2020). The US Energy Information Administration’s 2011 report, which ranked Argentina third and fourth globally in unproved technically recoverable shale gas and shale oil reserves,9 respectively, boosted these hopes (US Energy Information Administration 2011). The shale reserves are located in the Vaca Muerta Basin, which overlaps primarily with the provinces of Neuquén and Rio Negro. The US government supported shale in Argentina, with Secretary of State Hilary Clinton spearheading the Global Shale Gas Initiative that promoted shale and marketed US companies’ shale expertise, even in countries where local communities’ opposition to shale extraction was growing (Fang and Horn 2016; Horn 2018). The Cristina Fernandez government (2007–​2015) and the Mauricio Macri government (2015–​2019) supported shale development in Vaca Muerta Basin as a strategy to generate exports in order to earn the foreign currency needed for its debt payments. Argentinian debt, three-​quarters of which is denominated in foreign currency, amounted to 79 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) in 2019 (Nelson 2020; Gobierno de Argentina 2020; Di Paola 2020; Economist Staff 2019). In 2012, the Argentinian legislature enacted Law 26,741 on Hydrocarbon Sovereignty (Ley 26.741 de Soberanía Hidrocarburifera), which paved the way for the nationalization10 of Repsol-​YPF (Fernández González et al. 2019). In 2013, the government promulgated Decree 929/​1311 to incentivize foreign companies to invest in shale development (Riffo 2017; Romero and Krauss), and, days later, YPF signed an agreement with Chevron, the first foreign company to undertake major exploration in the Vaca Muerta Basin (Riffo 2017). Both the Fernandez and Macri governments poured subsidies

638   Shanti Gamper-Rabindran into the industry, aiming to incentivize private investments. In June 2020, President Alberto Fernandez, despite conceding that Argentina could not rely on the Vaca Muerta shale development to spur Argentina’s growth (Mander 2020a), still approved subsidies for that development (Fundación Ambiente y Recursos Naturales [FARN] 2020).

The Argentinian Shale Industry’s Poor Financial Performance The Argentinian shale industry faced headwinds in 2014 with the global crash in oil prices, pushing YPF to cut costs and production (Mander 2016), and then again with Argentina’s economic turmoil after 2017 (Economist 2019). By mid-​2019, oil and gas activities declined as a result of the freeze on oil prices and exchange rates, policies enacted to cope with Argentina’s economic turmoil, and of the political uncertainty from the 2019 elections (Garrison 2019). In 2019, YPF posted US$536 million in losses (Reuters Staff 2020). Reports of Argentina’s oil and gas production generally do not separate production from shale oil and gas wells in the Vaca Muerta Basin from overall oil and gas production in the region, making it difficult to assess the true progress of shale development. However, a number of reports reveal limited progress toward the hyped goals12 (Romero and Krauss 2013). Between 2013 and 2019, only 342 unconventional oil and gas wells were drilled and completed (Sanzillo and Hipple 2019). As of 2020, only 10 of the 31 projects launched since 2013 were producing oil and gas (Collins et al. 2020). The total production from the eight shale oil projects is 93.2 thousand barrels per day13 (Collins et al. 2020). In December 2018, Vaca Muerta facilities (both conventional wells and shale wells) produced 1.0 billion cubic feet per day (Bcf/​d), amounting to 23 percent of Argentina’s total gross natural gas production (US Energy Information Administration 2019).

Argentinian Government’s Debt-​Financed Subsidization of the Shale Sector The government’s debt-​financed shale development strategy was an imprudent financial gamble (Acacio 2018; FARN 2019; FARN 2020; Zanotti 2019) with adverse financial, social, and environmental impacts (Bernáldez and Herrera 2020; Svampa 2019; Bianchi 2015; Radovich 2017; Di Risio 2017; Picolotti 2013). By 2019, the government strategy of taking on debt14 while subsidizing the shale sector helped drive the country’s debt burden into the abyss without creating a financially viable sector (Acacio 2018; FARN 2019; FARN 2020; Zanotti 2019). The rapid accumulation of governmental debt (not all of it financing shale development), alongside runaway inflation, contributed to a crisis of confidence, Argentina’s peso devaluation in 2018, and its request for and receipt of a $57 million bailout package from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) (Economist 2019). In 2019, the economy contracted by 2.2 percent, and concerns grew about Argentina’s potential default on its interest payments due in 2020 (Nelson 2020). Argentina’s Minister of Productive Development, Matias Kulfas, acknowledged that shale wells in Argentina could operate and produce only because subsidies offset high

Fracked Taxpayers and Communities     639 production costs in the Vaca Muerta Basin (Hipple and Sanzillo 2020). Companies received large subsidies relative to their investments. Among the 10 recipients of subsidies in 2019, Tecpetrol’s15 receipt of subsidies was equivalent to 58 percent of its reported planned investments in 2019. The analogous figures were 39 percent for Compañía General de Combustibles and 50 percent for Wintershall (FARN 2019). These subsidies amounted to at least a third of the earnings of Tecpetrol and Compañía General de Combustibles (FARN 2019). Companies reduced production as soon as the government cut subsidies in response to the fiscal austerity requirement under the IMF bailout package (Williams-​ Derry et al. 2020). In January 2019, the Macri government reduced its subsidy for domestic natural gas producers and made those changes retroactive to 2018 (Williams-​Derry et al. 2020). Shale development imposes upfront costs but promises uncertain returns. Shale wells in Argentina, like those in the United States, face rapid declines in production within 2–​ 3 years16 (Garcia Zanotti 2019), thus necessitating the drilling of new wells to keep up production. However, production costs, including drilling costs, are higher in Argentina than in the United States17 (Zborowski 2018). Massive investments are needed to build roads, rail, pipelines, and waste treatment plants that are lacking in Vaca Muerta to support shale development (Collins et al. 2020). Gas producers also face limited gas demand from within Argentina. While the government subsidized companies to increase shale gas production, it simultaneously faced a glut of gas (Straccia 2019). The government’s hopes that domestic demand would rise by car owners switching to compressed natural gas proved unrealistic given Argentina’s recession (Sanzillo and Hipple 2019). Its plan to increase exports through liquefied natural gas (LNG) exports faces competition from other low-​cost producers with secured contracts, plus the expensive construction of LNG export terminals (Sanzillo and Hipple 2019). The government subsidized the shale sector in at least three ways. First, the government set a price floor for domestic producers of natural gas from unconventional reservoirs. In 2013, the Fernandez government’s stimulus plan (Resolution No. 1/​2013) guaranteed a US$7.5/​MMBTU price floor (Garcia Zanotti 2019). In 2017, the Macri government’s stimulus plan (Resolution No. 46-​E/​2017) set a similar price floor of US$7.5/​MMBTU in 2018, US$7.00MMBTU for 2019, and 6.5 US$/​MMBTU for 2020. At the same time, gas was sold in the domestic market and exported at lower prices (US$3.5–​4.2/​MMBTU), with the government—​and effectively taxpayers—​picking up the difference (FARN 2019). While the subsidies were reduced from US$15.6 billion in 2016 to US$7.2 billion in 2018, the cumulative subsidies are staggering (Sanzillo and Hipple 2019). In response to the global oil price crash in 2014, the Macri government set a price floor for domestic oil producers at $67 dollars per barrel. The second channel of government support is by financing YPF, which has been the leading investor in shale development projects in collaboration with other domestic and foreign companies. Despite the Macri government’s vision that foreign investors will take on larger share of investments, in reality, from 2012 through 2017, Argentine-​based companies contributed 65 percent of the actual investments of US$13.9 billion in the Neuquén, with foreign companies contributing the rest (Sanzillo and Hipple 2019). US companies that had initially invested in Vaca Muerta—​Occidental Petroleum, Pioneer Resources, EOG Resources, and Apache—​sold off their holdings to YPF (Solbrække 2016). YPF, entrusted with spearheading shale development, was financially weak. It had rapidly accumulated

640   Shanti Gamper-Rabindran debt, from $2 billion to $7 billion in 2012 alone (Mander 2016). In 2017, it relied on government subsidies for 79 percent of its operating income and 100 percent of its profits (Sanzillo and Hipple 2019). The third channel of government support is the securing of loans through cooperation agreements between YPF and foreign companies at unattractive terms. Investigations by scholars and journalists raised red flags on the high risk-​to-​return ratio for Argentinian taxpayers from these agreements, which have not been made public. For instance, according to Garcia Zanotti (2019), under the 2013 YPF-​Chevron agreement, YPF received a loan with 7 percent interest from Chevron through a series of shell companies.18 The agreement provides Chevron with a guaranteed interest income of 7 percent, and Chevron could receive 50 percent of earnings from initial wells in perpetuity19 (Romero and Krauss 2013; Garcia Zanotti 2019). The devaluation of the Argentinian peso, by 37 percent relative to the US dollar in 2019, further worsened the terms of these dollar-​denominated agreements for Argentinian taxpayers (Reuters Staff 2019). The discussion on financial aspects in the US and Argentinian shale industries underscores their poor performance. That a shale industry with such shaky financial foundations became established in both countries demonstrates how government institutions that oversee financial institutions and corporations (in the United States) and government decisions on whether to provide capital (in Argentina) or to provide bailouts for the industry (in the United States and Argentina) are crucial for the industry’s inception and survival. In the case of the United States, shale companies were able to attract financing within a capital market that was largely free of any restraints against excessively exuberant representations about potential returns from the industry. At the same time, the US government blunted the important twin of unfettered markets; that is, the market discipline that forces the demise of poorly performing companies, by providing taxpayer-​funded bailouts of those companies and—​consequently—​their investors. In the case of Argentina, the government, through the partially publicly owned YPF, poured investments into highly risky shale ventures without publicly disclosing the risks–​returns from these investments and thus directly encumbered taxpayers with losses from bad bets. That shale industry inflicted significant negative spillovers on local communities and still was able to expand largely unrestrained in both the United States and Argentina demonstrated how legal institutions serve as a sword against surface owners and local communities who oppose shale development and a shield against liability despite imposition of adverse public health and environmental impacts. The next section details how laws in the United States and Argentina privileged those who benefited from extractive activities over those who bore the costs from those activities.

US Institutions: Limited Protections for Surface Owners and Local Communities Under US law, states determine if oil and gas extraction can proceed and regulate the oil and gas sector. Most state governments with shale resources have supported shale development, except Maryland and New York.

Fracked Taxpayers and Communities     641

Mineral Rights Dominate Over Surface Rights With the green light from state governments for shale development, laws favoring mineral rights over surface rights have enabled the shale industry to expand largely unimpeded. In the United States, the bulk of shale reserves lies beneath private lands, where private entities own the mineral rights and surface rights. Especially in areas that have experienced significant mining, the ownership of the mineral and surface estates is often split among separate entities. A substantial share of the ownership of mineral estates is held by those who do not reside in the same county (Fitzgerald 2014). The rights of mineral owners dominate the rights of surface owners. Some of those who hold both the surface and mineral rights have chosen to permit shale extraction, thus balancing their rents from leasing their mineral rights and royalties from shale production versus the costs from shale extraction.20 However, extraction has also proceeded despite opposition from surface owners who have borne damages even in states where legislation offers some protections to surface owners (Collins and Nkansah 2015). Forced pooling laws in some states further favor extraction by permitting the owners of a majority share of neighboring mineral rights to proceed with extraction over the objection of those who hold a minority share (Gorovitz Robertson 2017).

State Governments’ Powers Preempt Local Governments’ Powers Local communities have not been able to impose significant restrictions on shale extraction because of preemption by state laws or because of local communities’ limited appetite and financial capacity to face legal challenges from shale companies. Local governments that imposed restrictions, moratoria, and bans on shale extraction in response to voters’ ballots faced lawsuits, with state governments even taking the side of oil and gas companies to oppose these restrictions. Many state governments, including those in Texas, Colorado, Ohio, and West Virginia, have prevailed in legal challenges, successfully arguing that state laws preempt local governments restrictions (Pickle 2014). In Pennsylvania, which is one of the few US states in which environmental rights are enshrined in its constitution, the Supreme Court struck down provisions of a state law that severely constrained local governments’ ability to restrict shale extraction (Dernbach 2015). Even with that ruling, municipalities faced with proposed extraction in their jurisdiction were reluctant to restrict drilling out of fear of lawsuits should they impose regulations viewed as too restrictive by the companies (Frazier 2018). In rare cases, state legislatures have granted greater powers to local communities to regulate oil and gas activities within their local jurisdiction. For instance, in 2020, Colorado enacted Senate Bill 181, which recognized the importance of public health and environmental protection and expanded local governments’ authority to regulate the surface operations of oil and gas production. Even with this legislation in place, the Boulder District Court voided regulations promulgated by the City of Longmont on the storage of waste from shale operation, a surface operation. The Court also ruled against Longmont’s ban against fracking. While the court reasoned that the law did not permit cities to block oil

642   Shanti Gamper-Rabindran and gas operations altogether, proponents of the ban counter that the Senate bill permitted local governments to prioritize health and environmental protection and block extractive activities that threaten those priorities (Lacey 2020).

State Governments’ Weak Protections for Public Health and the Environment The industry and its political supporters presented the technologies of high-​volume hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling as mature technologies without significant adverse impacts that did not require comprehensive regulations (Baka et al. 2018). Because many state governments did not set up baseline and systematic monitoring of air and water quality in shale extraction areas, scientists, local communities, public health, and environmental advocates were constrained from presenting systematic evidence of the adverse impacts from the life cycle of shale activities, especially in the earlier phases of shale expansion (Gamper-​Rabindran 2014; Moore et al. 2014; Vengosh et al. 2014). State legislators futher aided the shale industry by preventing the compilation of knowledge on the adverse impacts of the industry. For instance, Pennsylvania legislators enacted a law that required a health professional trying to find out which chemicals their patients may have been exposed to from hydraulic fracturing fluids to sign a confidentiality agreement, thus preventing them from alerting others who could be at risk of exposure and preventing researchers from compiling data relevant to health impact assessments (Gamper-​Rabindran 2014). State legislators did not act decisively to address gaps in public health and environmental regulations, particularly in states that relied more heavily on revenue from the shale industry (Gamper-​Rabindran 2017). Notably, these regulatory gaps were left unaddressed at the federal level. The oil and gas industry long enjoyed exemptions from federal environmental law provisions that apply to other heavy industries (Gamper-​Rabindran 2017; Gamper-​Rabindran 2022). Likewise, federal regulations on interstate shale gas pipelines and other pipelines that cross Native American treaty and ancestral lands—​infrastructure essential to support the expansion of shale extraction in new shale basins—​favor pipeline developers over the protection of landowners and residents in the path of those pipelines (Gamper-​Rabindran 2022). The few regulations promulgated at the federal level during the Obama administration (e.g., regulating hydraulic fracturing on public lands21) never came to effect because of litigation from several state governments. Regulations that did come into effect for a short period, such as curbing methane emissions from oil and gas operations on public lands and on private lands were repealed or weakened by the Trump administration (Gamper-​Rabindran 2022).

Argentinian Institutions: Limited Protections for Local Communities In Argentina, the provincial governments that own the mineral rights decide if oil and gas operations can proceed in their provinces, grant concessions for oil and gas extraction,

Fracked Taxpayers and Communities     643 receive the royalties from the extraction, and regulate the operations of shale companies. The provincial governments of Neuquén and Rio Negro rely on the oil and gas sector that has operated in the region for decades22 for significant shares of the revenue (Christel and Novas 2018). The provincial governments have been able to suppress opposition against shale development from local communities by using and also circumventing the legal system. Local communities opposed to shale include agricultural communities in the Alto Negro River Valley area and the Mapuche Indigenous communities that claim land rights in the Vaca Muerta region (Svampa 2019). The conflicts between Indigenous communities against oil and gas companies date back to the conventional oil and gas operations in the region.23 For instance, the Mapuche communities of Paynemil and Kaxipayiñ have battled against the adverse impacts of oil and gas drilling to their livelihoods, public health, and environment since the 1970s in the Loma La Lata fields24 (Falaschi 1999; Balazote and Radovich 2001; Maraggi 2020). In 2017, of the 60 Mapuche communities recognized by the Mapuche Confederation of Neuquén, 22 are in conflict over territorial occupation by oil companies (Radovich 2017).

Municipal Governments Preempted by Provincial Governments Under Argentinian law, the provincial governments’ decision on whether to permit oil and gas extraction preempts local governments’ powers to restrict shale development. Therefore, municipalities opposed to fracking are not able not assert their preferences when the provincial government supports shale extraction.25 The Neuquén government acted swiftly to seek a court ruling when the municipality of Vista Alegre declared that it was a frack-​free locality (Christel and Novas 2018). The Superior Court of Justice of the Province of Neuquén held that “constitutionally, no municipality was authorized to interfere, under any aspect or in any way, in the regulation of natural resources, legislating, prohibiting exploration and/​or exploitation in gas and/​or oil fields, whether conventional or unconventional, using the fracking technique” (Christel and Novals 2018; Lanusse 2019). Likewise, the Superior Court in the Rio Negro province nullified the declaration of the municipality of Allen that had declared itself frack-​free (Lanusse 2019). However, municipalities were able to assert their preference in the Entre Rio province, which did not have an influential incumbent oil and gas sector and whose governor had initially entertained the idea of shale extraction (Christel and Novas 2018). Between 2013 and 2017, 37 municipalities declared themselves to be frack-​free areas and built the political movement that culminated in the Entre Rios Provincial government enacting Law No. 10,477 that banned fracking in the province (Christel and Novas 2018).

Provincial Governments’ Undermining of Legal Protections for Indigenous Communities In Argentina’s constitution, federal laws and Argentina’s obligations under international laws offer a number of protections for Indigenous peoples (Saulino 2017; Marchegiani et al. 2020).

644   Shanti Gamper-Rabindran A 1994 amendment to the Argentinian Constitution recognizes the rights of Indigenous peoples to their ancestral lands and to manage their natural resources (Marchegiani et al. 2020). Argentina also ratified the Organization of American States charter in 1984, thus accepting as binding the decisions of the InterAmerican Court of Human Rights, which has advanced protections for Indigenous peoples. In 2000, Argentina had also ratified the International Labor Organization Convention 169,26 which mandates the state to recognize Indigenous peoples’ right to free, prior, and informed consent (FPIC) (Marchegiani et al. 2020) (on FPIC in the forestry sector, see Bartley this volume). As Rosti (2016) documents, however, the Neuquén provincial government enacted laws to undermine the protections of Indigenous peoples and circumvented protections under federal and international laws. These actions predated the shale rush. Under the 1985 federal law on Indigenous Policy and Support for Aboriginal Communities (Ley 23.302 de Política Indígena y Apoyo a las Comunidades Aborígenes), Indigenous communities need to obtain personería jurídica status by registering in the Registry of Indigenous Communities (Registro de Comunidades Indígenas), which is managed by the National Institute for Indigenous Affairs. The personería jurídica status refers to an individual’s rights and obligations that are derived not from the individual’s personal legal rights. Instead these rights and obligations are derived from a group of two or more persons or an institution with a collective social objective (Prensa Ministero de Gobierno, 2018). Personería jurídica status is a fundamental requirement for an Indigenous community to gain recognition of its land rights against seizure by other interests. However, the Neuquén government enacted a provincial law (Decreto Provincial 1184/​2002) that made it more difficult for Indigenous communities to attain personería jurídica status. The provincial law required communities to obtain this status declaration at both the federal and provincial levels and mandated additional requirements at the provincial level. These additional requirements effectively blocked communities from successfully attaining personería jurídica status. No community has successfully gained this status since 1986, in the Neuquén province (Rosti 2016). In 2006, in response to intensifying conflicts from encroachment of extractive activities onto Indigenous communities, the federal government enacted the Emergency Law on Indigenous Properties (Ley 26.160 de Emergencia de la Propiedad Comunitaria Indígena).27 That emergency law was intended to halt evictions of Indigenous communities from lands they had traditionally occupied and to carry out territorial surveys needed to demarcate the land. The surveys are a requirement for the federal government to grant legal title to the community (Rosti 2016). The provincial government did not sign an agreement with the National Institute for Indigenous Affairs on undertaking territorial surveys until 2012, and thus the process has excluded numerous Indigenous communities (Rosti 2016). The Mapuche Confederation of Neuquén filed a challenge against the constitutionality of the provincial law to the federal Supreme Court (the Corte Suprema de Justicia de la Nación) in 2002 (Rosti 2016). On December 10, 2013, 11 years after the Mapuche Confederation filed their case, the federal Supreme Court ruled that the Neuquén provincial law was unconstitutional because it failed to offer the minimum protections for Indigenous peoples under federal law28 and it violated Argentina’s constitution and its obligations under international law. The Court specifically confirmed the federal law’s “self-​identification” criterion for recognizing the Indigenous identity and voided the additional criteria set by the province29 (Rosti 2016). The Neuquén government, armed with the provincial law Decreto Provincial 1184/​2002 and enabled by the delay in the Supreme Court’s judgment, successfully blocked Indigenous

Fracked Taxpayers and Communities     645 communities from gaining personería jurídica status. As a result of the government’s actions, the Mapuche communities, including the Campo Maripe that claimed land rights to the Loma Campana area (Radovich 2017), did not have personería jurídica status at the time when the federal and state governments signed agreements to develop shale resources in these contested lands. The federal government’s Decreto 929/​13 that set the terms for investments into shale development (Picolotti 2013) and the signing of the YPF-​Chevron agreement in July 2013 predated the decision of the Supreme Court. Thus, the communities could not mount a legal challenge against the provincial government’s granting of the 35-​ year concession for the YPF-​Chevron venture in these contested lands. Even after the Supreme Court decision, the Neuquén government continued to block the process through which the Mapuche communities could attain personería jurídica status (Radovich 2017). In 2014, the provincial government’s recognized a “reserve” area of only 68.3 hectares for the Campo Maripe community. That year, the provincial government and the community came to a negotiated agreement to do a territorial survey to determine the community’s land claims. The Anthropological Historical Report, carried out by an intercultural team in 2015 and endorsed by academics outside the province, supported the “territorial presence” of the Campo Maripe community on the 12,500 hectares that they claim. The report supported the Campo Maripe community land claims rooted in their settlement in the area since 1927, a time that even predated the 1955 formation of the province of Neuquén30 (Radovich 2017; Svampa 2019). However, the Neuquén government under Governor Jorge Sapag rejected the report, claiming the findings of the anthropological survey were not supported by the province’s administrative documents. As Radovich (2017) points out, this argument is fallacious and disingenuous: first, the methods applied by the team had been agreed on by both sides, and, second, the state’s administrative documents would not likely acknowledge the legitimate presence of the Indigenous communities given the provincial government’s historical approach of rejecting land claims and removing Indigenous communities. The Neuquén government under Sapag’s successor, Governor Omar Gutiérrez, continued to deny the Mapuche communities’ access to an objective process to evaluate their claims.31 In July 2019, Governor Gutiérrez relaunched the efforts to undertake territory surveys specified in the 2006 federal law, largely to quell oil and gas companies’ concerns about their investments (Durán 2019). However, his proposal to the National Institute of Indigenous Affairs omitted three communities that claimed land rights to oil and gas concession areas.32 The Campo Maripe was excluded on a disingenuous argument that their reservation was recognized only in 2014 (i.e., after the enactment of 2006 Ley 26.160). The Wircaleo and the Puel Pvjv communities in the contested areas of Vaca Muerta were also excluded from the survey. The three communities filed lawsuits against their exclusion (Duran 2019).

The Need for Institutional Reform and Research on How to Achieve That Reform Debt financing of an industry can be a legitimate financial strategy provided that the industry becomes financially viable while internalizing its social and environmental costs and

646   Shanti Gamper-Rabindran that adequate consideration is given to opportunity costs of not using that financing for other purposes. However, the experiences in the United States and Argentina warn that this is not the case with the shale industry. The financial costs from the industry, plus the social, public health, and environmental and climate costs of the sector undermine the argument that the shale industry can spur economic development. Regrettably, politicians continued to support the industry when its already bleak outlook inexorably worsened during the COVID-​19 pandemic. In March 2020, the US Congress enacted the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act aimed to assist otherwise healthy businesses adversely affected by the pandemic to maintain payroll and retain employees (Gelzinis et al. 2020). Thirty-​seven oil companies, service firms, and contractors exploited a tax provision in the Act and claimed $1.9 billion in tax benefits as of May 2020 (Dlouhy 2020). Notably, while politicians justified the bailout as necessary to protect workers and communities reliant on the oil and gas sector, investigative journalists tracked the bailout funds in several cases to benefit executives in the oil and gas sector (Dlouhy 2020). At the same time, the Trump administration denied funds requested by state governments for programs that would directly hire laid off oil and gas workers to cap abandoned oil and gas wells (Groom 2020). By contrast, President-​elect Biden’s Clean Energy Transition Plan aims to provide direct assistance to workers and communities in oil-​and gas-​reliant communities (Biden 2020). In May 2020, the Argentinian government provided a subsidy to domestic oil producers by setting a price floor of US$45/​barrel, double the market rate for local crude of around US$20–​25/​barrel, while consumers continue to pay high retail prices (Mander 2020b). In August 2020, the government announced Plan Gas IV, which set a price floor of US$3.50/​MMBTU for domestic producers of natural gas (FARN 2020). Reform of financial and legal institutions to force the oil and gas sector to internalize its costs and for greater transparency in government support for the industry is urgently needed, but the political and economic influence of the oil and gas sector have impeded reform. Voters in the United States and Argentina have achieved some—​albeit inadequate—​ steps to achieve institutional reform. Pennsylvania’s 1971 environmental amendment proved to be pivotal for the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania ruling as unconstitutional a state law that had quashed local governments’ powers to restrict oil and gas extraction in their localities (Dernbach 2015). In April 2019, Colorado enacted legislation that permitted local governments to impose “reasonable” regulations on shale that are stricter than state laws (Herrick 2020). That law moved the dial slightly to recognize local communities’ rights to assert their preferences.33 Argentinian legislators undertook some constitutional reform, enacted federal laws, and ratified international laws to protect Indigenous peoples. These laws, despite their circumvention in several cases by provincial governments, provide an important recognition of the rights of Indigenous peoples and provide a key avenue to advocate for their rights. These laws also provide the basis of opposition against financing of shale operations in Argentina by the US government’s development agency, Overseas Private Investment Corporation, renamed US International Development Finance. While their protests were ultimately unsuccessful, a few US congressional representatives and Argentinian nongovernmental organizations cited violation of Argentinian laws and international laws (Espaillat et al. 2019; Merkley et al. 2019; FARN, CIEL, & FOE 2019).

Fracked Taxpayers and Communities     647 The task ahead for the field of comparative political economy of the environment—​where research is urgently needed—​is to explore the factors and circumstances that have enabled reform of political, legal, and financial institutions. Oil and gas companies have benefited from subsidies and laws that have thumbed the scales in favor of fossil fuel extraction despite its enormous costs to the economy, people, and planet; the rapidly decreasing costs of alternative energy sources; and the worsening climate crisis. This chapter details how flows of capital, initially as investments and then as bailouts, provided sustenance for the shale industry to persist and expand in the United States and Argentina despite its poor financial performance. A ripe area for comparative research is the institutional reform (or lack thereof) across Europe, United States, and emerging economies to provide information to disincentivize capital flows into the oil and gas sector. How will reforms unfold across countries with and without oil and gas industries? To what extent will reforms influence the flow of financing away from carbon-​intensive investments? For instance, the European Central Bank has committed to stress-​test Eurozone banks in 2022 on their ability to withstand climate risks, including from climate regulations that diminish returns to investments in the oil and gas sector (Comfort 2020). The US Federal Reserve Board in Washington took a more tentative step in December 2020 by voting to become a member of the Network of Central Banks and Supervisors for Greening the Financial System (Condon 2020). Financial regulators in Latin America are only beginning to explore the vulnerability of their financial institutions to climate change and the risky prospects of oil and gas investments (Frisari et al. 2019). These measures and others will be important as the need to decarbonize energy systems intensifies in the face of the climate crisis.

Acknowledgments I thank Miranda Schreurs for hosting me as the August-​Wilhelm Scheer Visiting Professor at the Technical University of Munich. The Mascaro Faculty Fellowship for Sustainability at the University of Pittsburgh is gratefully acknowledged.

Notes 1. Emissions are from both methane leaks from shale operations and natural gas transportation and from the intentional venting and flaring of gas in shale oil operations. The oil and gas sector accounts for 68 percent of the increase in global methane of 25 teragrams per year since 2006 (Worden et al. 2017). Methane released in the extraction and transportation of natural gas releases causes as much radiative forcing over a 20-​year time horizon as do the carbon dioxide emissions from the combustion of that natural gas (Alvarez et al. 2018). 2. For details on the adverse public health and environmental impacts from shale extraction, see cited studies; for information on the gaps in environmental regulations in the United States and Argentina, see Gamper-​Rabindran (2017) and Gamper-​Rabindran (2022). 3. Tight oil is oil embedded in low-​ permeable shale, sandstone, and carbonate rock formations.

648   Shanti Gamper-Rabindran 4. Under a Chapter 11 bankruptcy, the company restructures its debt and finances. Under a Chapter 7 bankruptcy, the company ceases operations. Both can result in losses for creditors and shareholders. For instance, in 2015, Quicksilver Resources, a Texas-​based gas producer, went into Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, with creditors expected to lose about US$1.7 billion (Helman 2016). 5. Oil and gas companies that went bankrupt numbered 21 in 2015, 58 in 2016, 15 in 2017, 21 in 2018, and 25 by August 2019 (Adams-​Heard et al. 2019; Haynes and Boone LLP 2020). 6. Einhorn had made the call on the dot.com bubble (Foley 2015; Crooks 2015). 7. ExxonMobil’s chemical division suffered a loss in the fourth quarter of 2019; while Shell’s division reported a drop in earnings, and BP’s division also reported a fall in profits. 8. The Neuquén Basin contributed 54 percent of the gas and 43 percent of the oil produced in Argentina in 2011 (Bernáldez and Herrera 2020). 9. “Unproved, technically recoverable resources” refer to estimates of oil and gas that can be produced with existing technology, regardless of price and cost. The amount that can be economically recovered would depend on the cost of exploration, drilling and production, and the price of the products. 10. Repsol, a Spanish oil and gas company, owned controlling shares of YPF since 1995. Prior to the appropriation, Repsol owned 57.43 percent of shares. With the appropriation, the government of Argentina owned 51 percent of shares, with 26.01 percent held by the federal government and 24.99 percent by the provincial governors. In 2014, Repsol agreed to a US$5 billion settlement from the Argentinian government for the appropriation. 11. Oil and gas companies, provided they invest more than US$1 billion in the country, can sell 20 percent of their production abroad without paying export taxes or without obligations to repatriate profits. 12. In 2013, predictions were that “if all went well” the Chevron-​YPF alone would drill 1,000 wells by 2017 (Romero and Krauss 2013). 13. Collins et al. (2020) do not report the production from the shale gas projects. 14. For instance, in June 2017 alone, the Macri’s administration issued US$2.7 billion worth of 100-​year bonds at a yield of 8 percent (Economist Staff 2019). 15. Tecpetrol is owned in part by Techint, an Italian company with operations in Latin America. Wintershall is a German oil and natural gas company and a subsidy of BASF. Compañía General de Combustibles (CGC) is an Argentine company engaged in the exploration and production of hydrocarbons. The company owns interests in oil and gas areas in Argentina and Venezuela. 16. The report by Garcia Zanotti (2019) shows this production decline for the Tecpetrol wells in the Fortín de Piedra area, in the province of Neuquén. 17. The “break-​even” price for shale oil production in Vaca Muerta is between 35 and 40 US$/​barrel) (FARN) and for shale gas at US$4 per 1 million BTUs (MMBTU). However, preceding the discussion underscores the lack of transparency on whether companies will be able to earn profits when oil and gas prices exceed these “break-​even” prices. 18. These unattractive terms may be necessary to secure foreign loans, given the perception of high risks in investing in Argentina with its macroeconomic instabilities, its history of debt default, and its history of expropriation of foreign-​held assets. However, the availability of loans at unattractive terms at the minimum demands a rethink of Argentina’s strategy of relying on foreign financing and on a massive and risky development project.

Fracked Taxpayers and Communities     649 19. After the company invests US$1.2 billion, it can withdraw 18 months later from operations without penalty and continue to receive net profits of 50 percent of the production from the initial wells in perpetuity. 20. Even so, a number of class action lawsuits allege that shale companies underpaid mineral rights owners by making various postproduction cost deductions. Among companies that settled these suits are Chesapeake Energy, that settled for US$52.5 million with 13,000 claimants in the Barnett Shale in Texas in 2016 (Baker 2016), and EQT, that settled for US$53.3 million with 10,000 claimants in West Virginia in 2019 (Patterson 2019). 21. Public lands are owned and managed by the federal government, but they are physically located within state boundaries. 22. Oil and gas make up 30 percent of Neuquén’s income. 23. Conflicts between the Mapuche communities and the state of Argentina go further back in history. Between 1878 and 1885, General Julio Roca’s “Conquest of the Desert” genocidal campaign in Patagonia killed and displaced Mapuche communities, and, more recently, the military dictatorship between 1976 and 1983 evicted Mapuche communities from the area (Radovich 2017). 24. Paynemil was recognized as a “reserve” in 1964 and obtained control of the land in 1990–​ 1991, while Kaxipayiñ was only recognized in 1997. In the 1990s, the oil and gas company paid US$700 to US$900 per month to commission Paynemil for easements and nothing to Kaxipayiñ (Falaschi 1999). 25. The oil and gas sector, which makes up 30 percent of Neuquén’s income, exerts significant political and economic power in the provincial government (Christel and Novas 2018). 26. The Convention also recognizes Indigenous communities’ rights to receive legal protection and assistance, to receive acknowledgment and protection of ownership and possession, and not to be moved from their lands. 27. Despite this law, the Cristina Fernandez government made clear its prioritization of mineral extraction over protection of Indigenous communities. In 2010, Fernandez declared that if natural resources strategic for the country were to be identified in Indigenous lands in the future, then the government would privilege their exploitation over the protection of rights acknowledged or claimed on ancestral lands (Rosti 2016). 28. The court ruled that, under Argentina’s federalist system, provincial laws cannot contradict national laws and cannot offer protections less than those under the federal government. 29. The province set additional requirements, including ethnic identity, a current or past native language, a proprietary culture and social organization, preservation of their essential traditions, coexistence in a common habitat, and a minimum of 10 settlements. The Supreme Court underscored the federal criteria of self-​identification and the minimum of three families to establish the personería jurídica status. 30. They were pushed out of that area, but returned to live there in 2011 (Radovich 2017). 31. The provincial government’s delaying and obstructionist tactics runs counter to the 2001 judgment of the Inter-​American Court in Mayagna (Sumo) Community Awas Tingni v. Nicaragua. The court ruled that the State was required to create a mechanism for effective delimitation, demarcation, and titling of the properties of Indigenous communities and that, while these processes are undertaken, the State should refrain from undertaking actions that would permit the state or third parties to affect the lives of the Indigenous communities.

650   Shanti Gamper-Rabindran 32. The proposal included 34 communities, including 4 in the Confluencia area—​Newen Mapu, Paynemil, Purrán, and Kaxipayiñ—​that were embroiled in conflicts with the oil sector. 33. Media reports indicate that the industry’s propensity to sue local governments chilled their willingness to impose restrictions on shale development in their jurisdiction.

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Fracked Taxpayers and Communities     653 https://​pages.devex.com/​rs/​685-​KBL-​765/​ima​ges/​2019.8.26-​comme​nts-​re.-​ESIA-​Vista-​Oil-​ Gas-​Aleph-​Mid​stre​am_​F​ARN-​CIEL-​FOE.pdf Gamper-​Rabindran, Shanti. “Information Collection, Access, and Dissemination to Support Evidence-​Based Shale Gas Policies.” Energy Technology 2, no. 12 (2014): 977–​987. https://​ online​libr​ary.wiley.com/​doi/​full/​10.1002/​ente.201402​114 Gamper-​Rabindran, Shanti. The Shale Dilemma: A Global Perspective on Fracking and Shale Development. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2017. Gamper-​Rabindran, Shanti. America’s Energy Gamble: People, Economy and Planet. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2022. García Zanotti, Gustavo. “Vaca Muerta and Argentine Development: Assessment of Fracking and Future Outlook.” Report, Enlace por la Justicia Energética y Socioambiental. 2019. https://​opsur.org.ar/​wp-​cont​ent/​uplo​ads/​2020/​07/​Vaca-​Mue​rta-​full-​rep​ort.pdf Garrison, Cassandra. “Political Turmoil, Price Freeze Cast Shadow on Argentina’s Vaca Muerta.” Reuters. September 16, 2019. https://​www.reut​ers.com/​arti​cle/​us-​argent​ina-​econ​ omy-​ene​rgy/​p oliti​cal-​turm​oil-​price-​f re​eze-​cast-​sha​dow-​on-​arg​enti​nas-​vaca-​mue​r ta-​ idUSKB​N1W1​11P Gelzinis, Gregg, Michael Madowitz, and Divya Vijay. “The Fed’s Oil and Gas Bailout Is a Mistake.” Economy, Center for American Progress. July 31, 2020. https://​www.ameri​canp​ rogr​ess.org/​iss​ues/​econ​omy/​repo​rts/​2020/​07/​31/​488​320/​feds-​oil-​gas-​bail​out-​mist​ake/​+​ &cd=​2&hl=​en&ct=​clnk&gl=​ca Gobierno de Argentina. “Presentación Gráfica de la Deuda.” Argentina.gob.ar, Argentina Unido. 2020. https://​www.argent​ina.gob.ar/​econo​mia/​finan​zas/​pres​enta​cion​graf​i cad​euda​ publ​ica Gorovitz Robertson, Heidi. “Get Out from Under My Land: Hydraulic Fracturing, Forced Pooling or Unitization, and the Role of the Dissenting Landowner.” Georgetown Environmental Law Review 30 (2017): 633–​694 Groom, Nichola. “States Ask Trump administration to Pay Laid Off Oil Workers to Plug Abandoned Wells” Reuters. May 6, 2020. https://​www.reut​ers.com/​arti​cle/​us-​glo​bal-​oil-​ usa-​wells-​idUSKB​N22I​2KA Hausman, Catherine, and Ryan Kellogg. “Welfare and Distributional Implications of Shale Gas.” Brookings Papers on Economic Activity (2015): 71–​125. https://​www.brooki​ngs.edu/​ wp-​cont​ent/​uplo​ads/​2015/​03/​2015a_​haus​man.pdf Haynes and Boone LLP. Oil Patch Bankruptcy Monitor. November 30, 2020. https://​www. hayn​ e sbo​ one.com/​-​/​media/​F iles/​Energy ​_​B an​ k rup​ tcy_​ R epo​ r ts/​ O il_​ P​ atch​ _ ​ B an​ k rup​ tcy_​Moni​tor Helman, Christopher. “The 15 Biggest Oil Bankruptcies (So Far)” Forbes May 9 2016. Herrick, John. “Some Colorado Residents Want Their Local Governments to Ban Fracking. Here’s Why That Probably Won’t Happen.” The Colorado Independent. January 6, 2020. https://​www.colo​rado​inde​pend​ent.com/​2020/​01/​06/​sen​ate-​bill-​181-​local-​gov​ernm​ent-​ ban-​frack​ing/​ Hipple, Kathy, and Tom Sanzillo. “Vaca Muerta Update: Faltering Development Plans for Argentina’s Shale Reserves Will Accelerate Without Foreign Investment.” Report, Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis. 2020: 1–​14. https://​ieefa.org/​wp-​cont​ent/​ uplo​ads/​2020/​06/​Vaca-​Mue​rta-​Upda​te_​J​une-​2020.pdf Hipple, Kathy, Clark Williams-​Derry, and Tom Sanzillo. “Mounting Negative Cash Flows Highlight Struggles of Appalachian Fracked Gas Producers.” Report Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis. November 2019.

654   Shanti Gamper-Rabindran Horn, Steve. “Obama Alums Are Pushing Fracked Gas Exports. That’s Exactly What Trump Wants.” Desmog (blog), February 2, 2018. https://​www.des​mogb​log.com/​2018/​02/​02/​ obama-​offici​als-​trump-​ene​rgy-​domina​nce Jackson, Robert. B., Avner Vengosh, J. William. Carey, Richard J. Davies, Thomas. H. Darrah, Francis O’Sullivan, and Gabrielle Pétron. “The Environmental Costs and Benefits of Fracking.” Annual Review of Environment and Resources 39 (2014): 327–​362. Jacquet, Jeffrey B. “Review of Risks to Communities from Shale Energy Development.” Environmental Science & Technology 48, no. 15 (2014): 8321–​8333. Kilian, Lutz. “Why Did the Price of Oil Fall After June 2014?” Vox EU, February 25, 2015. https://​voxeu.org/​arti​cle/​cau​ses-​2014-​oil-​price-​decl​ine Krauss, Clifford. “Glut Marks End of Natural Gas Boom.” The New York Times, December 12, 2019. Kunkel, Cathy, Sean O’Leary, and Ted Boettner. “Falling Short Shale Development in West Virginia Fails to Deliver on Economic Promises.” Report Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis. February 2019. https://​ieefa.org/​wp-​cont​ent/​uplo​ads/​2019/​02/​ West-​Virgi​nia-​Shale-​Deve​lopm​ent-​Falls-​Sho​rt_​F​ebru​ary-​2019.pdf Lacey, Hank. “Boulder Judge Rejects Fracking Ban, Law Week Colorado.” November 4, 2020. https://​laww​eekc​olor​ado.com/​2020/​11/​boul​der-​judge-​reje​cts-​frack​ing-​ban/​+​&cd=​9&hl=​ en&ct=​clnk&gl=​ca Ladd, A. E. Fractured Communities: Risk, Impacts, and Protest Against Hydraulic Fracking in US Shale Regions. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2018. Lanusse, Francisco Jorge. “Examining the Exploitation of Unconventional Hydrocarbons in Argentina Under the Prism of the US Fracking Experience.” Texas Journal of Oil Gas & Energy Law 14 (2019): 161. Legere, Laura. “Pa. Legislature Adopts $670 Million Tax Credit Bill for Petrochemical Plants.” Pittsburgh Post Gazette. July 14, 2020. Loderby, Asjylyn. “Energy Giant Undone by Big Land Grab.” The Washington Post. July 8, 2012. Luhavalja, Amanda. “How Not To Do M&A’: A Look Back at Exxon’s Deal for XTO 10 Years Later.” S&P Global. December 16, 2019. Mander, Benedict. “Argentina Plans to Set $45 Oil Price in Push to Save Vaca Muerta.” Financial Times. May 7, 2020b. https://​www.ft.com/​cont​ent/​e7656​3f0-​1fe3-​4f95-​8372-​8ac1c​ 970b​cd4 Mander, Benedict. “Argentine President Tells Creditors: ‘We Can’t Do Any More’ ” Financial Times. July 19, 2020a. https://​www.ft.com/​cont​ent/​ea410​bee-​8985-​411d-​9ac2-​07a95​e6c6​9b5 Mander, Benedict. “Miguel Galuccio Resigns From Argentina’s YPF.” Financial Times. March 9, 2016. Maniloff, Peter, and Ralph Mastromonaco. “The Local Employment Impacts of Fracking: A National Study.” Resource and Energy Economics 49, no, C (2017): 62–​85. Marchegiani, Pia, Elisa Morgera, and Louisa Parks. “Indigenous Peoples’ Rights to Natural Re­sources in Argentina: The Challenges of Impact Assessment, Consent and Fair and Equitable Benefit-Sharing in Cases of Lithium Mining.” The International Journal of Human Rights, 24 (2020): 2–3, 224–240. Maraggi, Ines. “Conflictos Territoriales y Resistencia Mapuche en Loma la Lata y Loma Campana, Neuquén, Argentina.” Boletín Geográfico 42, no. 1 (2020): 35–​55. http://​170.210.83.53/​ htdoc/​rev​ele/​index.php/​geogra​fia/​arti​cle/​view/​2701/​0 Mason, C. F., L. A. Muehlenbachs, and S. M. Olmstead. “The Economics of Shale Gas Development.” Annual Review Resource Economics 7, no. 1 (2015): 269–​289.

Fracked Taxpayers and Communities     655 Matthews, Christopher M. “An Oilman’s $1 Billion Bet on Shale Doesn’t Stack Up—​And Investors Pay.” Wall Street Journal Abstracts. April 16, 2019. McLean, Bethany. Saudi America: The Truth about Fracking and How It’s Changing the World. New York: Columbia Global Reports, 2018b. McLean, Bethany. “The Next Financial Crisis Lurks Underground.” The New York Times. September 2, 2018a. https://​www.nyti​mes.com/​2018/​09/​01/​opin​ion/​the-​next-​financ​ial-​cri​ sis-​lurks-​unde​rgro​und.html McLean, Bethany. “Coronavirus May Kill Our Fracking Fever Dream.” The New York Times. April 11, 2020. Merkley, Jeffrey A., Cory Booker, Edward Markey et al. “Letter of Concern: ‘Aleph Midstream S.A. (Argentina)’ and ‘Vista Oil & Gas Argentina S.A.U.’ Pending Approvals.” Addressed to Overseas Private Investment Corporation Board of Directors. September 10, 2019. http://​foe.org/​wp-​cont​ent/​uplo​ads/​2019/​09/​19.09.10-​Vaca-​Mue​rta-​OPIC-​Let​ ter-​Sig​ned.pdf Metcalf, Gilbert E. “The Impact of Removing Tax Preferences for US Oil and Natural Gas Production: Measuring Tax Subsidies by an Equivalent Price Impact Approach.” Journal of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists 5, no. 1 (2018): 1–​37. Meyer, Gregory. “Chevron’s $10bn Write Down Highlights Shale Stress.” Financial Times. December 11, 2019. https://​www.ft.com/​cont​ent/​77c89​23a-​1c31-​11ea-​97df-​cc63d​e1d7​3f4 Moore, Christopher W., Barbara Zielinska, Gabrielle Pétron, and Robert B. Jackson. “Air Impacts of Increased Natural Gas Acquisition, Processing, and Use: A Critical Review.” Environmental Science & Technology 48, no. 15 (2014): 8349–​8359. Nair, Shanti, Ron Bousso, Jennifer Hiller, and Aishwarya Venugopal. “Analysts See More Write-​downs Coming in US Shale Sector.” Reuters. December 12, 2019. Nelson, Rebecca. “Argentina’s Economic Crisis and Default.” Report, Congressional Research Service. 2020. https://​fas.org/​sgp/​crs/​row/​IF10​991.pdf Neville, K. J., J. Baka, S. Gamper-​Rabindran, et al. “Debating Unconventional Energy: Social, Political and Economic Implications.” Annual Review of Environment and Resources (2017): 42. Olson, Bradley, and Lynn Cook. “Wall Street Tells Frackers to Stop Tallying Barrels, Focus on Profits.” Wall Street Journal, Eastern Edition. December 7, 2017. Olson, Bradley, Rebecca Elliott, and Christopher M. Matthews. “Fracking’s Secret Projection Gap—​Analysis Shows Many Wells Underperform.” Wall Street Journal, Eastern Edition. January 3, 2019: A.1. Patterson, Brittany. “EQT Agrees to $53 Million Settlement for Improper Gas Royalty Payments.” West Virginia Public Broadcasting. February 13, 2019. https://​www.wvpub​ lic.org/​news/​2019-​02-​13/​eqt-​agr​ees-​to-​53-​mill​ion-​set​tlem​ent-​for-​impro​per-​gas-​roya​lty-​ payme​nts Pickle, James K. “Fracking Preemption Litigation.” Washington and Lee Journal of Energy, Climate, and Environment 6, no. 1 (2014): article 9. Picolotti, Juan M. “Análisis del Decreto No. 929/​2013 Desde una Óptica Jurídica y Ambiental.” Revista Iberoamericana de Derecho Ambiental y Recursos Naturales 9 (2013). https://​ar.ije​ dito​res.com/​articu​los.php?ida​rtic​ulo=​66006 Pooler, Michael. “Surge in Plastics Production Defies Environmental Backlash.” Financial Times. February 12, 2020. Post Gazette Staff. “Chevron Plans to Leave Appalachia, Following the Footsteps of Other Giants.” Pittsburgh Post Gazette. December 11, 2019.

656   Shanti Gamper-Rabindran Prensa Ministero de Gobierno. “Personería Jurídica: Todo lo que Tenés que Saber para estar en Regla.” September 5, 2018. https://​sisanj​uan.gob.ar/​min​iste​rio-​de-​gobie​rno/​2018-​09-​05/​ 9802-​per​sone​ria-​jurid​ica-​todo-​lo-​que-​tenes-​que-​saber-​para-​estar-​en-​regla Radovich, Juan Carlos. “Fractura Hidráulica y Conflicto Territorial en la Comunidad Mapuche Campo Maripe, Neuquén, Argentina.” Revista GeoPantanal 12, no. 22 (2017): 89–​104. Reuters Staff. “Argentine Energy Giant YPF Posts 2019 Operating Loss of 33.4 Bln Pesos.” Reuters. March 5, 2020. https://​www.reut​ers.com/​arti​cle/​ypf-​resu​lts-​idL​TAE6​N29M​01I Reuters Staff. “Argentine Peso Ends Tumultuous 2019 Down 37% Against the Dollar.” Reuters, December 30, 2019. https://​www.reut​ers.com/​arti​cle/​us-​argent​ina-​curre​ncy-​idUSKB​N1YY​1BO Richards, Heather. “Is US Shale Facing an ‘Unmitigated Disaster’?” E&E News. September 19, 2019. Riffo, Lorena. “Fracking and Resistance in the Land of Fire: Struggles over Fracking in Northern Patagonia, Argentina, Highlight the Need to Decommodify and Democratize Energy Resources and Seek Alternatives.” NACLA Report on the Americas 49, no. 4 (2017): 470–​475. Robertson, Helen. “Now For the Glut: Petrochemical Supplies Are Still Rising but Demand Growth Is Less Certain Than It Was.” Petroleum Economist. July 5, 2016. https://​www. petrol​eum-​econom​ist.com/​artic​les/​midstr​eam-​dow​nstr​eam/​refin​ing-​market​ing/​2016/​ now-​for-​the-​glut Romero, Simon, and Clifford Krauss. “An Odd Alliance in Patagonia.” The New York Times. October 22, 2013. https://​www.nyti​mes.com/​2013/​10/​22/​busin​ess/​ene​rgy-​envi​ronm​ent/​arg​ enti​nas-​oil-​ambiti​ons-​cre​ate-​unlik​ely-​allia​nce-​with-​chev​ron.html Rosti, Marzia. “Indigenous Rights and Extractivism in Argentina.” Federalismi.it: Rivista di Diritto Pubblico Italiano Comparato Europeo. Focus Human Rights 3 (2016): 2–​22. Rusco, Frank, Quindi Franco, Marietta Revesz, et al. “Oil and Gas: Bureau of Land Management Should Address Risks from Insufficient Bonds to Reclaim Wells.” Report, United States Government Accountability Office. 2019: 1–​33. https://​www.gao.gov/​ass​ets/​7 10/​701​450.pdf Sanzillo, Tom, and Kathy Hipple. “Financial Risks Cloud Development of Argentina’s Vaca Muerta Oil and Gas Reserves.” Report, Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis. 2019: 1–​57. https://​ieefa.org/​wp-​cont​ent/​uplo​ads/​2019/​03/​Financ​ial-​Risks-​Cloud-​ Deve​lopm​ent-​of-​Vaca-​Muert​a_​Ma​rch-​2019.pdf Saulino, Maria Florencia. “Argentina. Energy Extraction and Communities: Can Shale Development Proceed Without Causing Pollution and Conflicts?” In The Shale Dilemma: A Global Perspective on Fracking and Shale Development, edited by Shanti Gamper-​Rabindran. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2017: 305–​341. Schafft, Kai A., Erin McHenry-​Sorber, Daniella Hall, and Ian Burfoot-​Rochford. “Busted Amidst the Boom: The Creation of New Insecurities and Inequalities Within Pennsylvania’s Shale Gas Boomtowns.” Rural Sociology 83, no. 3 (2018): 503–​531. Sicotte Diane M., and Kelly A. Joyce. “Not a ‘Petro Metro’: Challenging Fossil Fuel Expansion.” Environmental Sociology 3, no. 4 (2017): 337–​347. Solbrække, Kjetil. “Market Development in Argentina: Is Vaca Muerta Competitive in Today’s Market?” Press Release. Oil & Gas Financial Journal. 2016. https://​www.rysta​dene​rgy.com/​ new​seve​nts/​news/​press-​relea​ses/​mar​ket-​deve​lopm​ent-​in-​argent​ina/​ Straccia, Jairo. “Government’s Adjustment Plan for Vaca Muerta Puts Conflict on the Horizon.” Buenos Aires Times (Buenos Aires, Argentina). February 2, 2019. https://​www.bati​mes.com. ar/​news/​econ​omy/​gove​rnme​nts-​adj​ustm​ent-​plan-​for-​vaca-​mue​rta-​puts-​confl​ict-​on-​the-​ hori​zon.phtml

Fracked Taxpayers and Communities     657 Svampa, Maristella. Neo-​Extractivism in Latin America: Socio-​Environmental Conflicts, the Territorial Turn, and New Political Narratives. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. https://​doi:10.1017/​978110​8752​589 US Energy Information Administration. “Review of Emerging Resources: US Shale Gas and Shale Oil Plays.” Analysis & Projections. July 8, 2011. https://​www.eia.gov/​analy​sis/​stud​ies/​ uss​hale​gas/​ US Energy Information Administration. “Growth in Argentina’s Vaca Muerta Shale and Tight Gas Production Leads to LNG Exports.” Today in Energy. July 12, 2019. https://​www.eia.gov/​ todayi​nene​rgy/​det​ail.php?id=​40093 US Energy Information Administration. “How Much Shale Gas Is Produced in the United States?” Frequently Asked Questions, US. Updated September 11, 2020a. https://​www.eia. gov/​tools/​faqs/​faq.php?id=​907&t=​8 US Energy Information Administration. “How Much Shale (Tight) Oil Is Produced in the United States?” Frequently Asked Questions, US. Updated September 11, 2020b. https://​ www.eia.gov/​tools/​faqs/​faq.php?id=​847&t=​6 Vengosh, Avener, Robert. B. Jackson, Nathaniel. R. Warner, Thomas. H. Darrah, and Andrew. J. Knodash. “A Critical Review of the Risks to Water Resources from Unconventional Shale Gas Development and Hydraulic Fracturing in the United States.” Environmental Science & Technology 48, no. 15 (2014): 8334–​8348. Williams-​Derry, Clark, Kathy Hipple, and Tom Sanzillo. “Shale Producers Spilled $2.1 Billion in Red Ink Last Year.” Report, Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis. 2020: 1–​9. https://​ieefa.org/​wp-​cont​ent/​uplo​ads/​2020/​03/​Shale-​Produc​ers-​Spil​led-​2.1-​Bill​ ion-​in-​Red-​Ink-​Last-​Yea​r_​Ma​rch-​2020.pdf Worden, John R., Anthony A. Bloom, Sudhanshu Pandey, et al. “Reduced Biomass Burning Emissions Reconcile Conflicting Estimates of the Post-​2006 Atmospheric Methane Budget.” Nature Communications 8 (2017): 2227. Zanotti, Gustavo García. “Vaca Muerta and Argentine Development: Assessment of Fracking and Future Outlook.” Report, La Justicia Energética y Socioambiental. 2019. https://​opsur. org.ar/​wp-​cont​ent/​uplo​ads/​2020/​07/​Vaca-​Mue​rta-​full-​rep​ort.pdf Zborowski, Matt. “How Does Vaca Muerta Stack Up vs. US Shale? Data Tell the Tale.” Journal of Petroleum Technology 71, no. 2 (2018). https://​pubs.spe.org/​en/​jpt/​jpt-​arti​cle-​det​ail/​ ?art=​4918

Chapter 34

Renewable E ne rg y, Energy P ove rt y, a nd Clim ate C ha ng e Opportunities and (Many) Challenges Michaël Aklin Introduction Over the past two centuries, the world economy has grown at a historically unprecedented pace (Jones 2016, p. 8). Living standards have increased across the world. Yet a range of factors have trapped some populations in poverty and have widened inequality (Milanovic 2016). Lack of access to energy is one of these factors. Energy poverty—​the lack of affordable access to modern energy technologies—​can affect the ability to live a dignified and productive life. Any kind of economic activity requires energy as an input. Households are also dependent on it: lighting, refrigerating, cooling, and heating are all ingredients to a comfortable home. Using cell phones or internet connections requires reliable access to power. Thus, energy poverty constitutes a major impediment to welfare and economic growth (Barnes 2018). At the same time, energy consumption can also be excessive. Its side effects can harm populations beyond what they deem acceptable and without their consent. The use of fossil fuels—​the most commonly used sources of energy since the Industrial Revolution—​has several nefarious consequences, ranging from air pollution to climate change (Perera 2017). To the extent that energy consumption reduces social welfare, it becomes a problem of collective action. In the absence of political oversight, unconstrained economic growth can lead to unfettered environmental degradation.1 Thus, the world faces two connected problems. First, many people, especially those among the most vulnerable, are energy poor. Billions lack access to reliable electricity or clean cooking fuels, with negative consequences for their livelihoods. Improving energy access would reduce barriers to economic growth. Second, many countries generate excessive greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions as a by-​product of their energy consumption, thereby

Renewable Energy, Energy Poverty, and Climate Change    659 contributing to climate change. De​carbonizing energy systems would make future growth more environmentally sustainable. Renewable energy offers a promising solution that can, in theory, simultaneously reduce countries’ climate footprint while addressing the energy needs of millions of people across the world. But will it do so? Using an interdisciplinary lens, this chapter has three aims. First, I briefly review the role played by renewable energy at the intersection of environmental, energy, and economic policies. Second, I clarify how political, economic, and social factors shape the prospects of renewable energy deployment. Success and failures in the deployment of renewables depend heavily on public policies. Comparative studies of political actors, institutions, and the societies in which they are embedded are therefore crucial to understand why and when renewables can succeed. Throughout, I focus primarily on their role on renewables in electricity generation and, occasionally, on cooking. This choice is motivated by the fact that renewables play the most advanced role in electricity. In the last two sections, I investigate the barriers faced by renewable in the present and the future. I discuss how some of the lessons learned in the case of electricity apply (or not) to other areas such as transportation.

Energy Poverty and Sustainable Development Any form of productive activity necessitates energy. Eras of human history coincide with the development of sophisticated ways to unleash increasing amounts of it (Smil 2010, p. 48). After using their own muscles, humans gradually used others—​animals, rivers and seas, and machines—​do the work for them. The development of the steam engine in the early nineteenth century expanded in an unparalleled fashion the realm of what humans could do and where they could go (Smil 2017, p. 235). The steam engine made use of the high energy potential of fossil fuels to generate movement on demand—​a useful feature for all kinds of industrial activities. The transition to electricity further expanded the range of services that energy could provide, such as convenient lighting and refrigeration. In some countries, electricity also facilitates cooking and heating. Later developments, such as nuclear power, contributed to the provision of electricity in large quantities and at a low marginal cost. As a result, energy in general, and electricity in particular, play a fundamental role in modern economies. The revolutionary nature of modern energy and its social impact were recognized early on. Friedrich Engels noted that the “steam engine . . . gave rise, as is well known, to an industrial revolution, a revolution which altered the whole civil society” (Engels 1943). Though there is debate over the validity of this claim (Clark and Jacks 2007), several scholars have argued that access to energy was an essential impetus for the Industrial Revolution (Pomeranz 2000, p. 66; Allen 2009, p. 80). Recent studies confirm that economic welfare and energy are closely linked. At the macro level, shocks to the oil supply can cause recessions (Baumeister and Hamilton 2019). At the micro level, several studies show that getting access to energy (and electricity) increases people’s welfare. In a study in Bangladesh, Khandker, Barnes, and Samad

660   Michaël Aklin (2009) find that electrifying rural households increases their income by up to 30 percent. Another study focusing on India identifies some of the mechanisms that explain these gains. Among others, access to electricity reduces the need for fuelwood and therefore frees household members (especially women) from spending time collecting it (Khandker et al. 2014). These findings are echoed by Dinkelman’s (2011) study of an electrification program in South Africa. She shows that electricity access helped women enter the labor force and create new small firms. Even larger firms suffer from poor electricity supply: blackouts in India have been estimated to reduce a typical plant’s yearly revenues by 5 to 10 percent (Allcott et al. 2016, p. 587). Thus, high living standards require access to affordable and reliable energy. Yet many people are deprived from the benefits of modern energy technology. The concept of “energy poverty” characterizes households and individuals that find energy either too costly to use or entirely unavailable (Pachauri et al. 2004; Nussbaumer, Bazilian, and Modi 2012; Bouzarovski and Petrova 2015; Aklin et al. 2018). Energy poverty can affect all facets of energy usage. The concept itself originated in the recognition that many British households faced dauntingly high heating costs (Bouzarovksi 2018, p. 10). But energy poverty is particularly problematic in the case of electricity and cooking. According to the IEA (2019, p. 1), about 1 billion people lack access to electricity. This number has been declining, notably thanks to rapid progress made in South Asia. Yet challenges remain. In countries such as India, newly grid-​connected households often find that electricity is available for much less than 24 hours a day. Wealthy countries themselves also must cope with many people living in energy poverty. In the United States, millions of people are disconnected every year from the grid because they struggle to pay their bills (Bednar and Reames 2020). Likewise, millions of European households are believed to face difficulties meeting their energy needs (Bouzarovksi, Petrova, and Sarlamanov 2012). The situation is even worse with respect to clean cooking technology. About 3 billion people cook with solid fuels, such as wood or charcoal (IEA and World Bank 2017). Using these fuels indoors contributes to household air pollution. Such pollution has been estimated to cause the premature deaths of 4 million people per year (WHO 2016, p. ix). Women and children, who often spend more time indoors, are particularly exposed. Using solid fuels has also an opportunity cost: it must be collected, which, in the absence of easy access to good transportation systems, can be time-​consuming (Malla and Timilsina 2014, p. 18). There are, therefore, compelling ethical reasons to make access to energy cheaper and easier (Sovacool et al. 2016). Electricity and cooking both shape a household’s and country’s welfare. Beyond this, affordable transportation and heating are also essential to expand individuals’ opportunities and comfort. Where access does not yet exist, governments and private agents ought to invest in it. Where access is feasible but out of reach of the poorest, public policy ought to make it cheaper. Thus, energy has long been primarily a political problem rather than a technological one. From the construction of large dams in the nineteenth century to the deployment of tiny solar panels in the twenty-​first century, governments shaped the provision of this essential input (Moe 2010; Smil 2017, Aklin et al. 2018). Understanding energy poverty requires us to study why some governments actively tried to expand energy access whereas others failed to do so. I will discuss this in greater details in a later section.

Renewable Energy, Energy Poverty, and Climate Change    661 At the same time, there exist strong reasons to worry about generating increasingly more energy. Energy usage produces about 75 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions (IPCC 2014, p. 9). Electricity generation represents about a third of this (25 percent of total GHG), most of which stems from coal power plants. Fossil fuels not only contribute to climate change, but they also create localized air pollution (Wei et al. 2018), which causes a myriad of health issues (Levy et al. 2009). Using solid fuels for cooking is also problematic; it is inefficient and strips forests, thus representing another source of climate change (Smith et al. 2000; IPCC 2014, p. 846). This is not to say that we have not become more careful with our use of energy. The energy intensity (energy consumed per unit of GDP) of modern economies has declined over the past decades (Chen, Huang, and Zheng 2019). But total energy consumption has steadily increased (Figure 34.1). Thus, even though we are becoming more efficient, we continue to consume more. This is good news from the perspective of the energy poor (assuming they get part of this growing pie), but it raises the question of the environmental sustainability of past and current practices. How countries and regions decide to power future growth will have important implications for our environment in general and for climate change in particular. Future economic development supported by fossil fuels is unlikely to be environmentally sustainable. If we want simultaneously to address the needs of the energy poor and reduce our collective impact on the environment, then new energy infrastructures will be necessary.

Energy consumption (exajoules)

600

World

400

Asia

200 North America Europe Middle East C. and S. America

0

Africa

1980

2000 Year

2020

Figure 34.1  Energy consumption by region. Source: BP (2020).

662   Michaël Aklin

The Prospects of Renewable Energy: Untapped Potential? In theory, renewable energy could provide energy in a sustainable manner. In practice, renewable energy has already become ubiquitous. Millions of rooftops have been plastered with solar photovoltaic (PV) panels, and wind turbines are a common sight across the planet (Mildenberger, Howe, and Miljanich 2019). Yet renewables’ contribution to our energy needs remain below what is required to decarbonize modern energy systems. This section examines the current state of affairs and reaches the conclusion that, despite rapid progress, renewables have yet to represent the core fuel for any country’s energy system. A later section discusses the reasons that led us to this situation. By renewable energy, I refer to energy sources that are replenishable within a human time horizon. Historically, water (rivers) has offered the most successful type of renewable energy. Water mills were known in Ancient Greece at the latest (Smil 2017, p. 146). Wind power has also long been used by civilizations across the world, whether via windmills or sails. More recently, solar power has been harnessed to generate electricity. Solar PV produces power by using sunlight to generate electric currents. In the future, perovskite cells may offer yet another way to use the sun to electrify our homes and our industries. Yet despite promising developments, renewables remain a small player when we consider primary energy consumption writ large. Neither in relatively rich countries of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD; 7 percent) nor in relatively poorer non-​OECD countries (3.5 percent) do renewables represent a dominant source of energy (Figure 34.2). Even in the European Union, which has generally been the most aggressive proponent of new renewable technologies, the share of renewables barely surpasses 10 percent. This picture is, however, somewhat misleading. If we focus more narrowly on electricity, where policy action has been the most effective, then we note that renewables have experienced considerable amounts of success over the past two decades (Figure 34.3). The share of electricity from new renewable sources (primarily wind and solar PV) has increased virtually everywhere. Some countries, such as Denmark, have been lauded for their success with renewables. Others, such as Kenya, have received less attention (Aklin et al. 2018). On average, since 2000, the share of renewables has increased on average by 0.33 percentage points per year.2 Renewable energy offers several benefits. It generally can be used in a way that minimizes the amount of GHG emissions. Lifecycle assessments typically find that the most commonly used types of renewable technologies generate considerably fewer emissions over their entire lifespan than do fossil fuels (Sathaye et al. 2011, p. 732). Even nuclear sometimes performs worse over its lifecycle. This is not to say that renewables are unambiguously clean from an environmental standpoint. Biomass, for instance, is renewable and yet can be produced in an unsustainable manner. Yet, in general, renewables outperform fossil fuels in general, and coal in particular, by a wide margin in terms of their climatic impact. Renewables are also often environmentally friendlier on other dimensions. For instance, renewable energy consumes less water (Lohrmann et al. 2019) and its generation

Renewable Energy, Energy Poverty, and Climate Change    663 (b)

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Figure 34.2  Primary energy consumption by source in 2019. Panel A: Total consumption. Panel B: Share of energy consumed from each source. Source: BP (2020).

generally does not contribute to air pollution (with biomass being occasionally an exception) (Hertwich et al. 2015). Renewable energy can also address energy poverty—​in theory, at least. The “fuel” used for turbines and PV systems is free. Costs are almost entirely concentrated in the assembly, installation, and maintenance of infrastructures. In general, these costs have declined significantly. The International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) estimates that the leveled cost of onshore wind projects declined by 39 percent between 2010 and 2019 (IRENA 2020, p. 22). Solar PV declined even more abruptly, by about 80 percent. Utility-​scale renewable electricity has, as a result, become extremely competitive. IRENA (2020, p. 37) estimates that onshore wind and solar PV can generate utility-​scale electricity more cheaply than coal. Thus, renewables may be able to provide electricity in the future where it is currently too expensive to be generated from fossil fuels. Furthermore, renewables can be extremely flexible. In the case of electricity, they can be used to power the grid or in a decentralized manner (or “off-​grid”). In the latter, electricity is produced and consumed on the spot, reducing the need for expensive transmission lines. A major impediment to the extension of the grid is that it is costly and only economically profitable if the number of new customers is high enough. As a result, for sparsely populated areas, the prospects of getting the grid are often bleak. Instead, off-​grid technology powered by renewable sources can represent a viable alternative. Since their arrival on markets several decades ago, a wide range of distributed technologies have been developed, including solar home systems, mini-​grids, micro-​grids, and so forth. Thus, off-​grid

664   Michaël Aklin

Denmark

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Figure 34.3  Percentage of electricity generated from renewable sources (including wind, geothermal, solar, biomass, and waste), by country. Countries listed on the right are those with a share greater than 25 percent. Source: BP (2020).

technology powered from renewable sources can help provide a modicum of energy access (Urpelainen 2014). Renewables therefore hold considerable promise. Yet their deployment, in the past and now, has been uneven and this, I argue, is essentially a matter of politics. The energy sector is characterized by seemingly every possible type of market and political failures. This implies that the successes and failures of renewables depend on the degree to which states are able to overcome collective action issues. In the next section, I draw the lessons from the development of renewables from an infant technology to its present state. My focus will be comparative in nature. I will study how individuals, organized interests, political parties, and institutions shape renewable energy policy. The story that emerges is a complex one in which voters have ambivalent views over the benefits of clean energy, whether they live in wealthy North American suburbs or in poor rural India (Stokes 2016; Aklin et al.

Renewable Energy, Energy Poverty, and Climate Change    665 2017). It is a story in which activists and fossil fuel lobby political parties of all ideological inclinations and where unions simultaneously must consider whether to support declining fossil-​based industries or support emerging green ones (Mildenberger 2020). And it is a story where emerging powers such as India and China must reconcile sometimes competing objectives ranging from providing cheap energy to their population, expanding their industrial interests abroad, and addressing pressing environmental issues at home (Rodrik 2014; Min 2015). These factors, taken together, help us understand the variation observed in Figure 34.3.

Past and Present Challenges: Why So Slow? If renewable energy offers such appealing benefits, what is holding it up? By 2016, only 10 percent of electricity globally was generated from modern renewables (i.e., renewables aside from hydro, which is a mature technology).3 Some countries, such as Denmark, scored higher, but, even there, electric systems remained far from decarbonized. The contribution of renewables outside of electricity is even smaller. Clearly, the world is not yet close to rely entirely (or even primarily) on renewables. What are the obstacles that prevent a full clean energy transition? The history of the electric grid offers interesting lessons to understand the challenges faced by renewables. To help make sense of the growth of renewables, it is helpful to break this history down in the key critical stages that any new product typically faces. Pioneered by Everett Rogers (2003) and others, the S-​curve of innovation posits that new products undergo distinct phases before they saturate a market. An innovation is first used by early adopters. If it finds sufficient demand, it will then take off and spread. As time passes, it will gradually reach the last reluctant customers. This logic can be modified and adapted to understand the obstacles to renewables (Schilling and Esmundo 2009). The original S-​curve model is a model free of politics. It makes no explicit assumptions about the political environment in which new technologies grow. Yet these contextual factors are essential to understand the tremendous amount of variation in the deployment of renewables across the world. In what follows, I use the S-​ curve model as a starting point and explain how variation in political and socioeconomic factors interacts with it. It offers a convenient way to identify the critical phases of the deployment of renewables. Yet, as I argue in the rest of this chapter, the problem of renewable energy is intrinsically a political one. In the first phase of the development of a new product, its proponents must figure out efficient ways to produce it. It is poorly known among the public and must find a customer base of enthusiastic early adopters. This initial phase is critical to demonstrate the future viability of this product. Investors are unlikely to be patient if the product cannot prove that it can reach enough people to be viable. This phase turned out to be critical for renewables on two grounds. As a source of electricity, renewables were not a new product per se. Rather, they were competing with well-​ established technologies. A unit of electricity from wind turbines “looks” the same as a

666   Michaël Aklin unit of electricity from coal. Mature electricity sources, having benefited from decades of investments, could provide the same product at a cheaper price. On top of this, the entire electric infrastructure had been tailored to accommodate fossil fuels and nuclear power. This fundamental advantage has been labeled by observers as a “carbon lock-​in” (Unruh 2000). Thus, facing a steep cost disadvantage, renewables faced an uphill battle: Why would anyone invest in renewable energy? The other problem in this early phase was related to intellectual property and returns on investments. Any technological improvement was bound to reduce costs across the industry. Thus, absent robust patenting mechanisms, investments in research would be a public good. Yet profits, if they were ever to materialize, would only be pocketed in the distant future. In fact, they may never materialize at all. Fossil fuels and nuclear power benefited from such a head start that it was difficult to imagine that renewables would catch up any time soon. Furthermore, established technologies did generally not have to face the costs of the negative externalities that they generated, while renewables were not in a position to be rewarded for the positive externalities that they created. In the late 1970s, there were therefore few reasons to expect that investing in renewables would be lucrative any time soon. Thus, the prospects of renewables depended heavily on sympathetic governments. State support was critical because it did not have to follow an investor’s logic. A government could invest in research and development even if it did not expect a return in the short run. Technically, the state played a crucial role of providing public goods in the form of investments in research (Stiglitz 1999; Loiter and Norberg-​Bohm 1999). In the case of renewable electricity, the impetus for states to provide such support came from the 1970s oil shocks and several nuclear incidents (Aklin and Urpelainen 2018). Rising costs of oil and declining public trust in nuclear power incentivized governments across the world to try out new technologies. Public opinion decisively turned against fossil fuel in several countries and gave the impetus for strong investments in clean energy (Jacobsson and Lauber 2006, p. 261). Elites joined in as well. The two oil crises led to a deep economic crisis with declines in real income and a rapid increase in unemployment across much of the non–​oil producing world. Not all countries were similarly at risk, however, and it is those countries such as Denmark and the United States that initially showed the most interest in renewables. It is not a coincidence that Jimmy Carter opened what would later be the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in the midst of the oil shocks (it was established in 1974, one year after the first oil crisis; it opened as the “Solar Energy Research Institute” in 1977). In comparison, elites in France decided to favor the development of nuclear power because they could capitalize on nuclear expertise that had been accumulated in support of its foreign and industrial policy (Hecht and Callon 1998). The case of the United States also underscores how fickle state support can be. After Ronald Reagan’s arrival at the White House, public investments in renewables R&D plummeted. The logic was political and not driven by science: fossil fuel interests moved aggressively against a potential competitor, and the Republican party, which was growing in several fossil fuel–​producing areas, was sympathetic to their arguments. By contrast, despite initial pushback from conservative politicians in Germany, strong popular support and the Chernobyl catastrophe limited the rollback of R&D resources (Jacobsson and Lauber 2006).

Renewable Energy, Energy Poverty, and Climate Change    667 Thus, maintaining reliable government support is the first critical challenge for the deployment of a technology that generates positive externalities and faces stiff competition. Without it, the business environment will generally be too harsh for newcomers to enter the market. Depending on domestic political factors, including (but not necessarily limited to) public opinion, the ideological inclination of ruling parties, the preferences of existing interests, vulnerability to fossil fuel shocks, and favorable legal and research environments, some countries were more likely to undertake these initial steps that proved to be so important for renewable energy. German, Denmark, and the United States were among those countries. Others, such as France, went down a different path. This had little to do with differences in entrepreneurship or tastes. Instead, variations in political factors are essential to understand these diverging paths. In the second phase, a new product spreads within and across markets—​if it is positively received by consumers. At this stage, customers become increasingly familiar with the product and it reaches an audience beyond early insiders. As costs decline, average consumers can start considering acquiring this product. In the case of renewables, this stage marks the many success stories observed since the late 1990s. Newcomers such as Spain and Portugal became the latest leaders in renewable electricity generation. But the landscape expanded even further. With some exceptions, such as Kenya, renewable energy had so far mostly been a topic in a small set of industrialized countries. Now, renewables turned into a global phenomenon (Kammen 2006; Martinot et al. 2002). They were not only increasingly visible in wealthy countries. Some of the poorest countries, such as El Salvador, with its rich biomass reserves, also became leaders in low-​carbon energy systems. Renewable electricity faced several challenges during this second phase. The first stemmed from worried incumbents. These include a range of actors, from fossil fuel producers to heavy industries and utilities. Renewables posed little threat as a niche technology favored by a few early adopters in California or Denmark. The situation looked different if, for instance, renewables were suddenly able to displace coal in a country like Germany. Likewise, renewables would be more menacing if they upended the business model of utilities. During this stage, utilities, fossil fuel producers, and other related interests mobilized to push back against pro-​renewable policies (Aklin and Urpelainen 2018; Stokes 2020). On the opposite side, supporters of renewables created their own lobbies, built ties to the nascent green parties, and engaged in the political process as well (Wüstenhagen and Bilharz 2006; Laird and Stefes 2009). Incumbents were not the only actors that pushed back against renewables. In some cases, consumers were (and still are) reluctant to support them. Social acceptance, here understood as people’s tolerance for a product, has long played an important role in many countries in the deployment of new energy technologies (Ramana 2011). For instance, public skepticism slowed down projects for new nuclear power stations in the United States and elsewhere (OTA 1984, p. 214). Events such as the Chernobyl catastrophe or the question of nuclear waste disposal reinforced public concern on health grounds (Assefa and Frostell 2007). In Germany, for instance, such concerns were sufficient to lead the center-​left SPD to abandon its pro-​nuclear stance (Jahn and Korolczuk 2012). Public hostility can also hurt renewables, albeit for different reasons (Walker 1995; Wüstenhagen, Wolsink, and Bürer 2007). While renewables are generally popular at the national level, local development projects often encounter fierce resistance by local

668   Michaël Aklin stakeholders (Jobert, Laborgne, and Mimler 2007; Stokes 2016; Hochstetler 2020). Partly, social hostility relates to people’s familiarity with the product. Individuals might simply exhibit distaste over a given product. Worries about the reliability of renewables may feed concerns and reinforce the (fossil fuel-​based) status quo. Other factors leading to social hostility are sociocultural (Assefa and Frostell 2007). People may be reluctant to modify their lifestyle. This may explain, for instance, the low adoption rate of modern cookstoves: while they are highly efficient compared to traditional cookstoves, they poorly fit the customs of local users (Mobarak et al. 2012). Hostility, in turn, has many sources, many of which are political in nature. Some studies suggest that social acceptance of a new technology like modern cookstoves could change with better tailored education policies, which themselves depend on how countries set up their educational systems (Harding and Stasavage 2014; Sharma, Parikh, and Singh 2019). Social acceptance also stems from the financial impact of renewable electricity. Wind turbines, notably, are often met with skepticism by the communities that are asked to host them. They need space and they modify the landscape. This may depress real estate prices and feed into public discontent (Jensen et al. 2018; Aklin 2021b). A study by Stokes (2016) in Ontario, Canada, suggests that voters dislike such top-​down imposed projects enough to punish officials at the next elections. Variation in deployment of infrastructures such as wind farms, then, depends on factors ranging from legalistic planning laws to the ability of communities to organize in favor (or against) such projects. Again, the prospects of renewables hinge on local and national political factors. Strategies to mitigate social hostility exist. Project developers can ensure that local actors derive some benefit from newly installed facilities (Stigka, Paravantis, and Mihalakakou 2014). Bottom-​up initiatives may also be more likely to succeed (Maruyama, Nishikido, and Iida 2007). And opposition tends to decline over time (Hoen et al. 2019). Yet, in all cases, the prospects of renewable electricity projects still depend on local buy-​in. In this second phase, government support remains important, but its nature changes. It shifts from focusing primarily on research and development to providing support for the physical deployment of renewable electricity (Breetz, Mildenberger, and Stokes 2018). Renewable electricity benefited tremendously from policies such as feed-​in tariffs that created profit opportunities for investors (Smith and Urpelainen 2014). Other green policies may also indirectly raise the cost of its competitors, reducing the cost gap between fossil fuels and renewable technology (Meckling, Sterner, and Wagner 2017; Matsuo and Schmidt 2019). This second phase is particularly critical for the long-​term prospects of renewables. In countries such as Denmark, the pro-​renewable interests (voters and the wind industry) managed to overcome pushback and established themselves as too big to fail. Vestas and Ørsted are flagship companies that have a global reach and create a heavy interest for renewables. Germany is also an illustrative case. Initial support began to wane in the 1980s and 1990s, as the conservative CDU government began considering dismantling supportive policies. Yet new coalitions and interest groups mobilized to counter these plans ( Laird and Stefes 2009). Farmers were enticed to support renewables by the authorities allowing them to host small-​scale hydro plants. Joining the nascent green movement, the research community lobbied as well to fight in favor of investments into renewables. In countries in which these coalitions were strong enough, renewable energy policy became less sensitive to electoral luck.

Renewable Energy, Energy Poverty, and Climate Change    669 In other countries, failure to maintain sufficient support forced renewables to remain marginalized. In the United States, cuts in public support led the renewable electricity industry to remain a secondary player (with notable exceptions in some states, such as Texas). Pro-​renewable coalitions were unable to fend off pushback from fossil fuel interests. The Reagan administration overturned several initiatives launched by Jimmy Carter. Bill Clinton, dealing with a mostly hostile Congress, was not able to push for the kind of policies that Germany adopted during the 1990s. And George Bush’s hostility to environmental regulations was well known. Thus, political elites were either unwilling or unable to overcome congressional obstruction against renewables. Yet this is not just a story about fossil fuel lobbies and Congress. Other actors proved crucial in the stagnation of the American renewable sector. Utilities used their influence in state legislatures to protect their business models against requirements to use renewables (Stokes 2020). Furthermore, hostility against renewables was rampant not only among Republicans but also among some Democrats, where parts of organized labor actively undermined new climate regulations under both the Clinton and the Obama administrations (Mildenberger 2020). Thus, despite localized success, the United States gradually lost the leadership it had shown at the end of the 1970s. Lack of success at this stage condemns the renewable electricity industry to remain dependent on the goodwill of governments (Aklin 2018). Worse, even sympathetic governments may be constrained by political institutions. In these countries, renewable energy policy remains a disputed topic, and support is only safe when veto players are either aligned with the interests of the renewable sector or neutralized. As a result, the lock-​in of a renewable energy system remains beyond reach. New elections, unfriendly legal decisions, or disputes within political coalitions can be crushing for the renewable industry. Thus, progress in these countries remains slow.

The Path Ahead At the time of writing, countries around the world are located at various points along the second phase of renewables deployment. Renewable energy can be found everywhere. But it is not equally present in all countries. To a limited degree, the discrepancy in the deployment of renewables can be attributed to geographical and economic factors. To a much larger degree, it is tributary to differences in political features across and within countries: what people, interest groups, and political elites want, and how institutions mediate these demands. The last step in the completion of a clean energy transition offers a new set of challenges, which I discuss next. There are reasons for cautious optimism that renewables may still help promote economic development while reducing energy poverty. Globally, the average cost of renewables has declined to the point where maintaining public support for fossil fuel infrastructure, such as coal power plants, is becoming extremely costly and politically unsustainable. Yet, from an environmental and climatic standpoint, the critical question is perhaps not whether renewables will power our future economies, but how quickly we will get there. What could slow down the completion of the third phase?

670   Michaël Aklin First, cost remains a concern. While the cost of renewables has declined, building up (where it does not exist) or replacing the entire generating capacity of a country with renewables remains a much more difficult task. Doing so appears technically feasible, but the costs it would impose remain quite high (Clack et al. 2017). Beyond this, analysts may want to distinguish between the cost of renewables (which has declined) and the bills faced by customers (which can remain high). Consumers who blame renewables for their high bills, whether rightfully or not, may be less inclined to support further expansion. Thus, costs matter because they make renewable energy politically salient and thus affect future policies enacted by governments. Yet costs are also under the indirect control of governments. The distribution of costs varies considerably from one country to another. In Germany, for instance, the cost of renewables primarily falls onto households (Cludius et al. 2014). Large and influential industries are exempts from most surcharges. One may conjecture that the structure of a country’s political system, and the varying levels of influence that firms and individuals have on the political process, may be an important predictor of the distribution of costs under a clean energy transition. Second, success stories should not hide the challenges faced by the renewable energy industry. While utility-​scale solar or wind power has become extremely competitive, this represents only a fraction of the promotion of renewable electricity. For instance, off-​grid technology providers often struggle with an unstable business environment and demanding customers (Lighting Global 2020, p. 221). Finding a reliable business model has eluded many actors in this sector. To be successful, off-​grid technologies must prove that they can meaningfully meet the needs of both households and firms. This may be a challenging task. For better or for worse, the renewable energy sector relies heavily on private actors (Schmidt 2014; Aklin 2021a). Most renewable energy technology producers are privately held for-​profits. They must raise resources on capital markets, and those that are publicly listed must also pay heed to the wishes of their main shareholders. This creates a fundamental tension: the energy poor are unlikely to be the most financially valuable customers. It also raises the importance of political institutions. The deployment of renewables, especially in an off-​grid form, is unlikely to be successful in countries in which firms are at risk of losing their investments. We may expect renewables to do better in countries with more robust legal institutions. Yet this, in turn, means that those who need cheaper energy access might be left out (Aklin 2021a). The management of the electric grid raises many questions as well. In Europe and elsewhere, utilities must deal with oversupply and vanishing profit margins.4 At the same time, home-​produced electricity might reduce demand. Utilities might thus further dig in their heels against renewables. Take Ohio, where FirstEnergy, a local utility, lobbied successfully (and, as it turns out, illegally) in favor of a bill in 2019 that reduced support for renewable energy.5 This highlights the ability of carbon interests to slow down the progress of renewables, at least under political systems that give more influence to concentrated interests. What will the grid sector look like in the future? Declining costs alone will probably not suffice for renewables to displace fossil fuel. In countries such as India, coal remains a politically influential sector, partly because hundreds of thousands of workers depend on jobs in the coal industry (Pai et al. 2020). Even in the United States, coal has primarily declined because of the competition from natural gas—​another fossil fuel with its own lobby and concentrated interests (Neville et al. 2017). As long as the renewable energy sector is rooted

Renewable Energy, Energy Poverty, and Climate Change    671 in the private sector, economic and political uncertainty will remain threats that may jeopardize its future growth. Third, as discussed earlier, the development of the renewable energy sector responded to a political logic. In a few key countries, renewable energy became a matter of industrial policy. Making renewables a jointly political and private venture (rather than purely a private sector one) was necessary to overcome the entrenched position of fossil fuels. To do so, renewable energy had to create its own political power (Schattschneider 1935; Pierson 1992). Yet this, in turn, could create roadblocks for even newer developments. Firms that entered the renewable sector in the 1990s and 2000s seek to recoup their investments. As newly political and politicized actors, they may be disinclined to encourage new innovations that could undermine their current modus operandi (Sivaram 2018, p. 164). This may slow innovation. In the United States, for instance, renewable lobbies have pushed for policies that supported their (narrower) interests without paying much attention to funding possibly even more efficient new technologies (Sivaram 2018, 166). Finally—​and perhaps most importantly—​electricity and cooking represent only part of the emissions stemming from energy. Transportation and buildings (which includes heating and cooling) account for 20 percent of GHG emissions (IPCC 2014, p. 9). Agriculture and land-​use changes account for another 24 percent. Renewable energy in these areas lags behind compared to its role played in electricity. There is, however, gradual progress being made in these areas as well. Electric vehicles (which can be powered with electricity from renewable sources) have had some success in recent years, and energy efficiency programs could reduce the emissions from old buildings. The case of electric vehicles illustrates again the influence of politics. The ambition of public policy over electric cars has been shown to depend on the presence of a sizable car production workforce as well as on the kind of relations between governments and large industrial interests (Mikler 2009; Wesseling 2016). Yet much remains to be done to crowd out fossil fuels. Remember Figure 34.2: if we consider energy in general, rather than electricity, we realize that there is considerable work to do. Even in countries such as Germany, which has been at the forefront of renewables, the latter’s share represents only 16 percent of primary energy consumption. In the emerging world, renewables contribute a paltry 3.5 percent of demand. Given the urgency of reducing GHG emissions, the (relative) success of renewables in the provision of electricity must not obscure the steep hill ahead to decarbonize energy generation writ large. Some of the challenges in these areas echo what happened to the electricity sector. Take, for instance, the transportation sector. Issues such as social acceptance may play an important role (Sovacool 2017). Likewise, incumbent industries (such as gasoline car producers) play a role that could mirror that of utilities (Meckling and Nahm 2019). Thus, lessons learned in the case of electricity could help understand the challenges in these other sectors. Undoubtedly, though, new challenges will arise.

Conclusion In many respects, the history of renewable energy is remarkable. Against all odds, renewables transformed the electricity market and became a key contributor to national power systems in several countries. A sober analyst in the 1990s would have been skeptical

672   Michaël Aklin about the prospects of renewable energy. Traditional energy sources had too much of a head-​start—​technologically and politically—​to be displaced. And yet, in several countries, renewables are on the cusp of achieving widespread use. To succeed, renewables had to mature. This process, far from solely being an engineering problem, depended just as much on politics. Savvy policy-​makers and activists (and occasionally luck) helped break the carbon lock-​in (Unruh 2002; Aklin and Urpelainen 2018). In the coming years, millions of people trapped in energy poverty should benefit from energy powered from renewable sources. This was not self-​evident, nor did renewables succeed everywhere. We still have a lot to learn from the politics of renewable energy. I see three areas, in particular, that warrant continued attention. First, we still struggle to understand the conditions under which renewable energy increases people’s welfare. This is particularly true for the off-​grid sector in emerging countries, where the renewable energy industry has devoted considerable efforts to design systems that meet people’s demands. Yet most studies find limited effects of off-​ grid power on income and economic growth (Burlig and Preonas 2016; Aklin et al. 2017). If renewables want to maintain and expand public support, they will need to have visible benefits. Comparative studies can help us identify the causal factors that make renewable energy more effective. Second, how well will our knowledge of the politics of renewable electricity travel to other areas, such as agriculture and transportation? Recent years have seen a growing body of literature about electric vehicle policies. Undoubtedly, there are similarities between electricity and the car industry. Both have (or had) incumbent actors that had to find ways to deal with a challenger. Both are often produced in the same countries (Germany, Poland, the United States, etc.). Yet there are differences, too. Some could make the obstacles in the transportation sector less challenging. For instance, several car manufacturers have tentatively tried to move ahead of the curve and invest in electric vehicles. I am not aware of a coal producer that has invested in solar panels. But others will make the situation more difficult. Germany, for instance, employs about 800,000 people in the car sector and many more along the sector’s supply chain. It only employs 30,000 in coal.6 Clearly, the political challenge there is of a different magnitude. Third, there remains considerable uncertainty regarding what a future carbon-​free energy system will look like. On the one hand, one may envision an entirely decentralized system, with energy produced and consumed locally, possibly in the spirit of cooperative ventures. On the other hand, we may also imagine an integrated energy system at the supranational level, where electricity produced by solar panels in, say, North Africa and dams in Norway all contribute to a system that powers everything from cars to kitchens across a continent. Which of these two extreme scenarios is most likely is uncertain. Countries and communities will continue to experiment along the way. Learning lessons, especially costly ones, will be especially important to complete transitions away from fossil fuel. Some lessons will be about local experiences and how renewables can be promoted at the micro level. Others will be systemic and focus on big questions: What role is there for further state-​led development of renewables? Can a system that relies more heavily on the private sector meet expectations of quality and fairness? The path ahead remains a thorny one. There remains a gap between an idealized carbon-​ free energy system and the messy real-​world infrastructures we must deal with. Ultimately, the key question will not be whether the transition happens, but how fast can it be concluded.

Renewable Energy, Energy Poverty, and Climate Change    673 Speeding it up will require even better technology. Beyond this, it will require thinking creatively about new political alliances and coalitions to break the remnants of carbon interests. As climatic deadlines loom, speed is of the essence.

Notes 1. This logic has been hotly debated. The “environmental Kuznets curve” posits a negative relation between economic output and pollution at high levels of income (Grossman and Krueger 1995). This line of thinking has been criticized on several grounds, including the fact that rich countries tend to outsource their pollution to poorer countries and therefore appear more sustainable than they are in reality (Aklin 2016). 2. This estimate is based on a regression of the share of renewables (excluding hydropower) on a time trend and country fixed effects. 3. IEA Data and Statistics, available at https://​www.iea.org/​data-​and-​sta​tist​ics/​?coun​try=​ USA&fuel=​Ren​ewab​les%20and%20wa​ste&indica​tor=​%20Re​newa​ble%20sh​are%20(mod​ ern%20ren​ewab​les)%20in%20fi​nal%20ene​rgy%20cons​umpt​ion%20(SDG%207.2)%20 (accessed on July 1, 2020). 4. “How to Lose Half a Trillion Euros,” The Economist, October 15, 2013. 5. “GOP Ohio House Speaker Arrested in Connection to $60 Million Bribery Scheme,” Washington Post, July 22, 2020. 6. On the number of car jobs, see “German Car Industry Faces ‘Day of Reckoning,’ ” Financial Times December 1, 2019. On coal jobs, see “Bye Bye Lignite: Understanding Germany’s Coal Phaseout,” Deutsche Welle January 16, 2020.

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Chapter 35

Re newable Ene rg y Su pply Chains and t h e J u st Transiti on Dustin Mulvaney Introduction After two centuries of society’s economic activities built on carboniferous energy (Mumford 1936), atomic power, and mega-​dam hydropower projects (Nixon 2010), renewable energy has ascended as a key decarbonization strategy in the twenty-​first century. Prompted by public policies and technical advances, bioenergy, wind, solar, smaller-​scale hydro-​, and geothermal power are increasingly planned, advocated for, and adopted as a means to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, reduce air pollution, and improve water efficiency from energy use. Systems of production, sometimes called commodity chains or value chains, are arrange­ ments of materials and labor that produce goods and services. Every product has a supply chain; this refers to a sequence of production from extraction to end use or disposal. Production systems can reach to the most remote ends of our planet because components for a product could come from any part of the world before reaching a consumer. Cobalt mined in the Democratic Republic of Congo might be refined into cobalt chemicals in China, manufactured into battery parts in Japan, and assembled in Germany before being sold anywhere in the world. This geographic variation of production resources and manufacturing offers opportunities to understand how renewable energy supply chains are shaping and are shaped by political circumstances and governance. Situating renewable energy supply chains in this way allows researchers to see comparative dimensions to understand what drives similarities and differences in production across space and time to better understand topics as varied as environmental inequality, international relations, and innovation policy. This chapter leverages brief case studies to illustrate the challenges of a just transition in renewable energy supply chains. The vignettes offer a starting point for comparative approaches to understanding why there are differences across and within production systems, from raw material acquisition to a product’s end of life, and the sometimes many

680   Dustin Mulvaney steps in between. This synthesis aims to highlight observations of renewable energy supply chain trends in the context of a just transition that may be helpful for applied or theoretical work in environmental politics. These examples of renewable energy supply chains are not intended to suggest widespread instances of negative impacts or intractable problems, but instead to offer up lessons to be learned for a better transition to renewable energy, one that aims to improve people’s lives and environmental quality. The roadmap for what follows is to first define what is meant by a renewable energy supply chain. Second, it is necessary to situate the notion of a just transition—​broadly construed as the incorporation of themes of environmental justice and worker’s livelihoods into climate policy and action—​in the context of these supply chains. Finally, the chapter will proceed through the leading renewable energies where supply chain engagements are critical to ensuring a just transition away from fossil and fissile energy (also see chapters by Lewis and Rabinowitz, in this Handbook).

What Is a Renewable Energy Supply Chain? Renewable energy is again increasingly powering the world in response to demands for cleaner power and low carbon combustion fuels. Renewable energy simply refers to energy that replenishes itself. This replenishment can be on a daily basis, as with the Earth’s rotation around the sun, as in solar energy; through daily to seasonal weather patterns, as in wind or hydropower; or even on a yearly basis, as with crops grown once a year for biofuels or firewood harvested from trees that took decades to grow. Hydropower is a long-​standing major renewable energy workhorse of industrial civilization, from eleventh-​century watermills to twenty-​first-​ century mega-​dams and electric power generators (Worster 1982). Hydropower is renewable in that the water cycle is generally continuous with snow-​and rainfall translating to gravitational potential energy that can be harnessed as kinetic energy as the water flows downhill. Solar, geothermal, and wind power are other renewable energy sources generating increasing amounts of electricity in some parts of the world. Growth in these renewables has been significant in some places, with sweeping changes in the electricity mix in cases like Denmark, Germany, China, and US states like California, where wind and solar make up increasing amounts of power starting around the 1980s (for California, see Vogel, in this Handbook). Supply chains are the sequential linkages between firms that connect production and manufacturing back to raw materials, primary energy, and natural resources. Some research communities and practitioners use analogous terms like “commodity chains,” “production networks,” or “filiere” synonymously with supply chains. Renewable energy supply chains come from and pass through different parts of the world, making them excellent and important units of analysis for comparative environmental politics research. To illustrate the supply chain concept for hydropower, one would have to consider not only the turbines, generators, cement, rebar, pumps, and pipes to build the dam and powerhouse, but also the suppliers of those products, as far back as the sources of copper, iron for steel, bauxite for aluminum, and so on. Photovoltaics and wind turbines have supply chains that more resemble those of semiconductors, electronics, and electric generators. Biofuels are another widespread renewable energy source, displacing nearly 10 percent of gasoline and diesel in some parts of

Renewable Energy Supply Chains and the Just Transition    681 the world, notably the United States and Europe. The supply chains for biofuels have more in common with agricultural systems or agroforestry (Neimark, Mahanty, and Dressler 2016). Geothermal power plants have supply chains in common with all energies utilizing steam turbines for electricity, from concentrated solar power to nuclear power, but also work with suppliers of the drilling equipment in common with oil and gas industries. Where renewable energy is directly harvested from the sun, wind, and waves, most of the environmental impact is from making and siting the devices and infrastructures, meaning that understanding the supply chains is important to see the full scope and extent of social and environmental impact. Wind and solar power require more and different metals and minerals to address carbon emissions reduction ambitions. Increased demand for natural resources such as quartz, bauxite (aluminum), cassiterite (tin), copper, aluminum, and rare earth elements (principally dysprosium, neodymium, and praseodymium); new forms of metallurgy and smelting; and specialized plastics and new fiber composites will require new materials, labor, and land for renewable energy. For renewables like biofuels, the production of the fuel itself can be the largest environmental impact, especially where it requires large amounts of land or causes water quality impacts. This chapter focuses on the renewables industries with global supply chains—​such as the wind, solar, biofuels and biogas, and battery storage industries—​where conflicts are most evident already and are likely to continue. Similar concepts could be applied to develop cases of geothermal, tidal power, hydropower, and other renewable energy supply chains and adjacent equipment, but those technologies do not have the same level of global sourcing for materials as the ones with extractive linkages: wind, solar, battery, and biofuel supply chains are far-​reaching and complex. Wind and solar power supply chains pass through geographies and political jurisdictions, making them opportunities for comparative research of both nations and competing production systems. Cleaner air, fewer toxics, less water used for energy production, and avoided combustion pollution all are benefits that society gets from these renewables. Renewables industries are positioned to make important contributions to sustainability and environmental justice by displacing greenhouse gas emissions and criteria air pollutants from fossil fuel industries, particularly where polluting emissions can be avoided in vulnerable communities. However, other renewables, like hydropower, have historically led to displacement and resettlement of people or major disruptions in ecosystems, with important examples from China, India, Laos, Brazil, Nigeria, and Malaysia (Aiken and Leigh 2015). The attribute of being renewable is not sufficient to understand the implications for sustainability or environmental justice because there are many ways that renewable energy could be produced, integrated, or deployed, and these configurations affect who benefits and who is made more vulnerable by energy transitions. A shift away from subterranean fossil fuels to renewables collected from devices and infrastructures on the Earth’s surface will come with tradeoffs, and these drive demand for new natural resources and lands rich in renewable energy resources (Sovacool, Ali, et al. 2020). Environmental pressures from renewables are already emerging from land use change, extractive industries, waste, and labor forces occupying sites of extraction and manufacturing facilities in new places across the world. For example, there are instances where solar parks in India cut off access to land to the landless, suggesting that some voices go unheard when energy systems change (Yenneti and Day 2015). Similarly, cases from Southern Mexico suggest that lacking democratic processes could lead to further enclosure

682   Dustin Mulvaney of communal lands, loss of sovereignty, and uneven accrual of privately held benefits (Avila-​Calero 2017). Supply chains often start from sites of extraction, where impacts from land use change and mining are often most evident, before moving on to processing and manufacturing sites that may entail chemical emissions, air pollution, and hazardous wastes. Renewable energy supply chains could be susceptible to injustices because some have commodity chains that could require new resource frontiers, different metals and minerals, and lands for mining activities; produce manufacturing facility emissions and effluents; and rely on labor with inadequate health and safety protections or unable to collectively bargain for better wages or expanded rights. Renewable energy relies on metals and materials supplied from places where the governments are often known for or accused of human rights violations, and this complicates the full picture of benefits (Sovacool, Ali, et al. 2020). Activists and policymakers advocating for a just transition center the question of who benefits and loses in technological and social change across the entire supply chain. This chapter explores what comparative politics can offer to our understanding of renewable energy supply chains and just transition. Several key renewables devices must be scaled and manufactured at an unprecedented rate for renewable energy to become a dominant source of electricity to satisfy global climate objectives. Photovoltaics, wind turbines, and lithium-​ion batteries for electric vehicles and stationary electric storage will be key technologies for clean power conversion long into the foreseeable future, but these require new and expanded extractive industries (Sovacool, Ali, et al. 2020). Renewables industries are already embroiled in geopolitical disputes (Klinger 2015), land use conflict from India to the North American west (Stock and Birkenholtz 2019; Mulvaney 2017), and end-​of-​life waste management challenges (Heath et al. 2020). They are also central to the imaginaries of statecraft and nation building as many governments aspire to exploit their own resources to develop and industrialize, as with the ambitions of Bolivia to supply lithium for batteries (Sanchez-​Lopez 2019). Similarly, talk about global competition for technological innovation involves building supply chains to gain geopolitical advantage (Sivaram and Saha 2018). Finally, digging into these commodity chains reveals a more complicated entanglement of petrochemical industries and electronics companies than the typical clean and renewable energy versus extractives and fossil fuel industries discourse commonly represented in energy transitions conversations.

A Just Transition to Renewable Energy The “just transition” concept calls attention to justice issues that arise in the transition from fossil fuels to a low-​carbon economy (Heffron and McCauley 2018). Just transitions writing, scholarship, and policy broadly imply justice considerations around several core themes (Newell and Mulvaney 2013). One important theme is justice for the fenceline communities who live, breathe, and depend on water impacted by the fossil fuel economy and the “riskscapes” of toxic landscapes (Morello-​Frosch, Pastor, and Sadd 2001). These injustices are widespread and global, spanning the poorer parts of affluent parts of the world and the least developed and most marginalized communities on Earth (Watts 2001).

Renewable Energy Supply Chains and the Just Transition    683 The just transition can also be described as a means to gain public acceptance of a low-​carbon transition by emphasizing new opportunities in emerging industries. A just transition for workers in the coal industry, for example, is a common theme in policy and practice, where workers are given compensation or retraining to better navigate evolving circumstances (He et al. 2020). However, simply designing policies to manage just transitions is complicated by questions around who benefits from these programs and who is left out (Cha 2020). The call for a just transition goes back several decades at least, with the issue initially identified by labor unions and other worker-​led groups (Stevis and Felli 2020). In the 1990s, claims that regulation in the United States and Europe offshored petrochemical industries to the developing world led to calls for a just transition for those workers in the form of retraining and compensation or, more broadly, some plan to ensure that workers are reemployed or provided social safety nets. Today, the concept is widely used in geography, political science, sociology, and by activists and policymakers to describe industries impacted by climate policies. Specific attention is paid to fossil fuel producers and workers, particularly with coal power plant and coal mine closures that are likely to result in significant industrial decomposition and employment loss. This is an area of widespread focus with some arguing that it is an ethical imperative because of its nexus with public policy. The argument presumes that public policy interventions prematurely end an industry’s financial viability and undermine its workforce (and unions in some cases), and therefore the public is obligated to ensure or help workers to continue to find work (Evans and Phelan 2016). For this latter reason, it seems that these approaches favor workers in incumbent industries, particularly the coal industry, because of case studies of targeted policies or plant closures (Pollin and Callaci 2019). But, given the initial emphasis on public policy, workers in renewables industries could also warrant support in jobs that might be lost from new ventures or bankruptcies. For example, this could include public investments in new photovoltaics manufacturing start-​ups that fail. Are they worthy of a similar safety net? It is arguably simpler to have training and reskilling programs be economy-​wide rather than targeted at employees from specific industries. The United States, unsurprisingly, does not have a nationwide just transition policy, but several states have developed policies that are congruent with the ideals of a just transition. On the other hand, many elements of the just transition away from coal in China, where coal counts for more than 60 percent of primary energy use, come from the top down, as part of China’s 5-​year planning process (He et al. 2020). Europe has developed a just transition policy that aims to invest in countries and regions impacted by the transition to low-​ carbon energy to prepare them for future jobs (European Union 2020). There are several varieties of justice invoked in calls for a just transition away from fossil fuels (see chapter by Pellow in this volume). But justice for and according to whom? Philosophers, social scientists, and others from the arts and humanities have long speculated on ideas of justice and its complexity (see chapters by Prakash Kashwan and Marion Suiseeya in this Handbook). A rough typology of environmental justice considerations for energy transitions must focus on themes related to the distribution of environmental harms and benefits, procedural issues related to participation, prior and informed consent with Indigenous groups, the quality of stakeholder involvements, and recognitional issues related to unanswered questions from the past that may be critical to restoring just social relations with fenceline communities and Indigenous groups (Marion Suiseeya et al. 2021).

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Renewable Energy Sources as Global Commodity Chains A supply chain describes how companies are interrelated, mainly capturing the relationship between companies and their inputs from other firms. Each step up the chain is a linkage from producer to producer or from a producer further up the chain back to extractive industries. As supply chains have a global reach that can have connections back to extractive industries, their investigation can reveal much about how a product is made from a sustainability and justice perspective (Heffron and McCauley 2014). Commodity chains are global assemblages of socio-​ecological relationships (Ogden et al. 2013). Methodologically, our understandings of commodity chains can be “heterogeneous, contingent, unstable, partial, and situated” (Marcus 1995, p. 6). For one, the shift to just-​in-​time production means that these systems can rapidly evolve or move from one place to another. Explorations into renewable energy supply chains can reassemble these relationships of production, spanning nature, culture, governance, labor, and capital flows, but the full picture often requires moving through multiple sometimes seemingly disconnected places, from mining sites, to agricultural fields, to other places where researchers might have access. What we understand about supply chains is limited by access to research subjects.

Solar Power Supply Chains Power from the sun is an icon of the low-​carbon energy transition. And justifiably so, with far fewer emissions than other sources of energy and its unique compatibility with residential power demand, solar power will help obviate many environmental problems with energy production, air and water pollution, and hazardous waste. Photovoltaics, the main type of solar power today, deliver clean electricity while generating no direct emissions; most associated environmental impact is in the supply chain and this poses challenges for a just transition (Mulvaney 2019; Fthenakis, Wang, and Kim 2009). In 2021, the United States began seizing imports of photovoltaics made in Xinjiang, China, claiming that the modules imported from that region may have been produced with materials from supply chains connected with forced labor (US Department of Labor 2021). In 2020, one-​third of global polysilicon was made in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in China, where it is alleged that forced labor and human rights abuses are ongoing. These serious allegations overlap with preexisting trade disputes between the United States and China, making another excellent case for the comparative study of the many dimensions at play here. Ensuring that renewable energy industries live up to their expectations will require great attention to detail and anticipating where risks and key challenges will emerge. Over its history, the photovoltaics module market share shifted from where it emerged in Europe, Japan, and the United States to China, Malaysia, Philippines, India, Vietnam, and Taiwan, much like other electronics and semiconductor industries. This move to low-​cost venues hosted by contract manufacturing arrangements was an important factor in driving

Renewable Energy Supply Chains and the Just Transition    685 down the costs of solar industry manufacturing. But many of the countries, such as China and Malaysia, to which the solar industry has shifted manufacturing have reported environmental, health, and safety compliance and enforcement challenges (Van Rooij et al. 2017). Most photovoltaic cells are refined from quartz (silica) into crystalline silicon, with a smaller percentage (