On one day in 2009, in thirty-eight countries around the world, 4,000 ordinary citizens gathered to discuss the future of climate policy. This project, 'WWViews', was the first-ever global democratic deliberation – an attempt to enable ordinary people to reach informed decisions on and impact the global policy process. This book – which analyzes the experiences and lessons from this ground-breaking event – marks the beginning of a new kind of democratic politics, providing practical lessons on how to increase the impact of global deliberation projects within the media and on official policy processes. The authors explore important themes for participatory approaches from the local to the global: the role of deliberation within global governance methodology and practice participant selection; policy impacts engaging the media how policy culture affects deliberation uptake capacity building and knowledge transfer process evaluation content and argumentation analysis gender, race and class aspects. The global aims of the 'WWViews project', along with the opportunity to evaluate the same process in different national and cultural contexts, makes this a hugely valuable and informative study for all those interested in democratic deliberation and environmental governance from the small to the international scale.

Presenting extensive new research, this ground-breaking study addresses the critical dimensions of participatory and democratic processes in the field of trade-sustainability relationships and sustainability assessments of trade rules. The specific issues in trade include social and environmental concerns for which there is a wide disparity of preferences and no economic benchmark. The contributors provide analytical responses to questions of how deliberative processes can adequately close the democratic gap in global governance and how institutional reforms can ensure better access to information, transparency, deliberation and more accountability. The book provides the necessary theoretical background as well as case studies to understand these issues and is suitable for students and academics in international law, international relations and economics.

This unique dictionary and introduction to Global Environmental Governance (GEG), written and compiled by two veterans of the international stage, provides a compilation of over 5000 terms, organizations and acronyms, drawn from hundreds of official sources. An introductory essay frames the major issues in GEG and outlines the pitfalls of talking past one another when discussing the most critical of issues facing the planet. It challenges those who are concerned with the management of our planet and its inhabitants to understand and accept a vocabulary common to the often-opposing objectives sought in the many GEG instruments.The result is a practical tool that should find a central place on the desk of anyone involved in environmental management, development or sustainability issues anywhere in the world, including the United Nations, government policy makers, NGOs and other stakeholder groups, the business community, and students and professionals.

An examination of the potential and limitations of deliberative consensus as a way to achieve effective international environmental governance. In this book, Walter Baber and Robert Bartlett explore the practical and conceptual implications of a new approach to international environmental governance. Their proposed approach, juristic democracy, emphasizes the role of the citizen rather than the nation-state as the source of legitimacy in international environmental law; it is rooted in local knowledge and grounded in democratic deliberation and consensus. The aim is to construct a global jurisprudence based on collective will formation. Building on concepts presented in their previous book, the award-winning Global Democracy and Sustainable Jurisprudence, Baber and Bartlett examine in detail the challenges that consensus poses for a system of juristic democracy. Baber and Bartlett analyze the implications of deliberative consensus for rule-bounded behavior, for the accomplishment of basic governance tasks, and for diversity in a politically divided and culturally plural world. They assess social science findings about the potential of small-group citizen panels to contribute to rationalized consensus, drawing on the extensive research conducted on the use of juries in courts of law. Finally, they analyze the place of juristic democracy in a future “consensually federal” system for earth system governance.

Aligning global governance to the challenges of sustainability is one of the most urgent environmental issues to be addressed. This book is a timely and up-to-date compilation of the main pieces of the global environmental governance puzzle. The book is comprised of 101 entries, each defining a central concept in global environmental governance, presenting its historical evolution, introducing related debates and including key bibliographical references and further reading. The entries combine analytical rigour with empirical description. The book: offers cutting edge analysis of the state of global environmental governance, raises an up-to-date debate on global governance for sustainable development, gives an in-depth exploration of current international architecture of global environmental governance, examines the interaction between environmental politics and other fields of governance such as trade, development and security, elaborates a critical review of the recent literature in global environmental governance. This unique work synthesizes writing from an internationally diverse range of well-known experts in the field of global environmental governance. Innovative thinking and high-profile expertise come together to create a volume that is accessible to students, scholars and practitioners alike.

Looks at the critical role of community members and other interested parties in environmental policy decision making.

This unique dictionary and introduction to Global Environmental Governance (GEG), written and compiled by two veterans of the international stage, provides a compilation of over 5000 terms, organizations and acronyms, drawn from hundreds of official sources. An introductory essay frames the major issues in GEG and outlines the pitfalls of talking past one another when discussing the most critical of issues facing the planet. It challenges those who are concerned with the management of our planet and its inhabitants to understand and accept a vocabulary common to the often-opposing objectives sought in the many GEG instruments. The result is a practical tool that should find a central place on the desk of anyone involved in environmental management, development or sustainability issues anywhere in the world, including the United Nations, government policy makers, NGOs and other stakeholder groups, the business community, and students and professionals.

This book examines the impact of current and emerging digital technologies on global environmental governance, and in particular on environmental civil society organizations. Technological innovations are constantly emerging: internet and social media platforms, blockchains, big data, and artificial intelligence are some of the most common or promising digital technologies of our times. Through case studies and the analysis of concrete applications of digital technologies, this book shows how these digital technologies can be deployed to support global environmental governance, and in particular a multi-stakeholder approach to the protection of the environment. It provides an overview of the diverse uses of these digital technologies by civil society organizations (CSOs) in global environmental governance. In this fast-changing context, the capacity of environmental CSOs to manage and benefit from digital technologies, and to produce and distribute information, can strengthen their participation in global environmental governance. Their key roles, including advocacy, monitoring, knowledge production, fundraising, nudging individual behaviors, and project implementation, greatly benefit from the use of these technologies. By examining some of the most-utilized current digital technologies and presenting some of the most prominent emerging ones, this book aims to illustrate how active civil society organizations operate, and how ICTs support some of their roles, and therefore their participation in global environmental governance. This book will appeal to scholars and students of environmental studies and politics, global governance, political sociology, geography and communication studies along with policy makers and communication specialists from the environmental community.

The world is entering a period of unprecedented environmental and political change. By mid-century, climate change will cause dramatic ecosystem shifts. Hundreds, if not thousands, of species will disappear from the earth including icons like polar bears, gorillas, Asiatic lions and bluefin tuna. For many cultures ’species’ are ’place’. As our cultivated global community erodes, international triage decisions about species and local ecosystems will commence and if we are not alert, these decisions will be made on our collective behalf, without local perspective or accountability. Global Environmental Governance, Civil Society and Wildlife illuminates a clear pathway for the environmental, non-governmental community to transition into a co-governance role. Many NGO diplomats have deeper experience and more technical knowledge about policy discussions than their government counterparts and are unburdened by sovereign constraints. The book puts forward the perspectives of developing world civil society and the case that it must play a more significant role in future decision making. Civil society from around the world must be welcomed by governments at the global environmental governance table if we are to hear birdsong after the storm.