Reasons for going global
It has become increasingly apparent that, although states have taken a wide range of steps to address environmental concerns, these have largely failed to stem the ongoing environmental decline. This raises the question of whether environmental integration is better or best approached at the international or global level. Could the obstacles inherent to national-level political-economic systems possibly be overcome at a higher level of collective decision-making?
The need for environmental considerations to be integrated into policies, decisions, and institutions at all levels of governance, from the local to the global, has been widely recognised since at least the early 1970s. The first global environmental conference was held in Stockholm in 1972, leading to the establishment of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). Internationally, efforts gained momentum in the late 1980s and early 1990s. This is reflected, among other things, in the growing number of multilateral environmental agreements (MEAs) that address a wide range of environmental issues. More recently, climate change has risen on the global agenda as arguably humankind’s most significant environmental threat, now receiving almost continuous attention worldwide.
Moreover, it has become a widely held view that it is increasingly difficult, if not impossible, for states to fulfil their basic functions on their own. While there is considerable debate about the extent to which states are still important or have become impediments to meeting the needs of their citizens, it is widely agreed that the environmental challenge is a global one. Although some environmental problems may be effectively addressed at the local or national level, no state can, by itself, ensure that the environmental conditions essential to human well-being or even survival, as well as those of numerous other species, will not be eroded and fundamentally compromised. Effective collective action encompassing most, if not all, states is required to address many environmental problems. This has now become the most pressing issue regarding global warming. The need for international coordination is essential in a world that has also become increasingly interwoven economically, and in which the effects of technological developments and environmental mismanagement do not respect national borders.
Even higher obstacles?
However, coordinated action at the international and global levels raises the challenges already discussed on other pages to an even higher level and introduces additional ones. Changing dominant worldviews to integrate environmental needs is no easy task, even in a small and/or culturally homogeneous state, let alone a mega-plural world of 8 billion people. Meeting economic and security needs in a global state system based on the principle of sovereignty and the wish of peoples to (re-) assert their independence (‘taking back control’) poses major contradictions and challenges. International and global policies and institutions face issues about their (relative) power, legitimacy, and effectiveness, giving them weak and uncertain foundations. All in all, there is much reason for doubt and to be sceptical about the effectiveness of international efforts in tackling environmental (and many other) problems.
Analysing global efforts
Nevertheless, before drawing any conclusions, it is necessary to analyse and assess the efforts towards global environmental integration. However, rather than describing the international responses to a range of environmental problems, I will discuss these efforts based on the environmental integration matrix presented on the Environmental Integration page. This classification is based on the argument or assumption that environmental concerns (or imperatives) need to be integrated within and across the full spectrum of everything that humans collectively think and do that has (potentially) a significant impact on the environment. This means, first, integrating environmental considerations into all areas of knowledge, views and ideas that guide human action, behaviour, and practice, in mutually consistent and compatible ways based on a collectively agreed overarching cognitive environmental framework. Second, it also means integrating those considerations into all collective choices (policies) and their implementation, guided by an overarching policy framework (a green plan). And third, it requires integrating these same considerations into all institutions (rules and organisations) that guide human behaviour, actions, and practices and creating overarching environmental institutions to guide, coordinate, and enforce that integration.
The three sections linked to this page provide a brief overview of the state of environmental integration in the cognitive, policy, and institutional domains at the international and global levels. The survey indicates that most progress has been made in the cognitive-internal domain, specifically by promoting sustainable development as the overarching framework for integrating environmental, economic, and social interests and concerns. Although essentially contested and prone to manipulation, sustainable development has become a globally prevalent concept that can provide a meaningful basis for embedding global social and economic policies within defined environmental parameters. However, the prevailing interpretation of sustainable development (as a ‘balance’ between economic, social, and environmental dimensions) has prevented it from being applied and implemented in ways that prioritise environmental imperatives. Hence, the concept has failed to function as a meaningful basis for integrating environmental imperatives into non-environmental cognitive frameworks (for instance, dominant economic ideology, theory and models) and overarching policy frameworks.
Agenda 21, adopted at the UN Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) in 1992, constituted the most comprehensive global action plan for implementing sustainable development that the world has seen thus far. But its lack of clearly identified planetary boundaries and environmental imperatives within which development must stay (or return) meant that it could not function as a basis for the greening of policies that have a significant impact on the environment, including economic, science and technology, energy, agriculture, and transport policies. The successors to Agenda 21 – the Millennium Development Goals and the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development – both narrowed the scope of the environmental integration challenge and reversed it by placing it within a dominant neoliberal economic framework.
Furthermore, the adoption of Agenda 21 and its follow-up policy frameworks has not been accompanied by reforms that prioritise environmental interests at the core of the global institutional framework. Attempts at reform even failed to significantly strengthen the institutional power of environmental advocates vis-à-vis non-environmental institutions. As a result, all the most important and powerful global institutions continue to prioritise non-environmental interests, particularly economic growth, while at best paying lip service to environmental concerns.
Similar underlying issues
To conclude, as in the national context, the main challenge to international and global environmental integration lies in the non-environmental institutional frameworks (rules and organisations) that promote goals and actions that cause environmental problems, rather than those directed at addressing them (environmental institutions). The rules and organisations that are the hardest to change are those geared towards promoting economic growth and development. Prominent among these are the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the WTO, and the rules governing their operations. Whether such institutions can be fundamentally changed requires examining the factors that underlie or drive global-level political decision-making. As noted before, the ability of individual states to effectively address the environmental challenge has become increasingly circumscribed by what is commonly referred to as the process (or processes) of globalisation.