The book analyzes the question of legitimacy and efficacy of certain organs created on the basis of Multilateral Environmental Agreements, i.e. Conferences and Meetings of the Parties. It analyzes their structure, new developments and collaborative efforts regarding the powers of these bodies in achieving desired goals of environmental protection. Contributors are: Michael Bowman, Edward J. Goodwin, Peter G.G. Davies, Feja Lesniewska and Philippe Cullet

This cutting-edge book considers the functional inseparability of risk and innovation within the context of environmental law and governance. Analysing both ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ innovation, the book argues that approaches to socio-ecological risk require innovation in order for society and the environment to become more resilient.

This volume examines environmental law and governance in the Pacific, focussing on the emerging challenges this region faces. Fourteen Pacific Island countries, and a broad range of themes, such as deep-sea mining, fisheries, protected areas, heritage, endangered species, human rights and access to justice, are addressed in the volume.

Today's most pressing environmental problems are planetary in scope, confounding the political will of any one nation. How can we solve them? Global Environmental Governance offers the essential information, theory, and practical insight needed to tackle this critical challenge. It examines ten major environmental threats-climate disruption, biodiversity loss, acid rain, ozone depletion, deforestation, desertification, freshwater degradation and shortages, marine fisheries decline, toxic pollutants, and excess nitrogen-and explores how they can be addressed through treaties, governance regimes, and new forms of international cooperation. Written by Gus Speth, one of the architects of the international environmental movement, and accomplished political scientist Peter M. Haas, Global Environmental Governance tells the story of how the community of nations, nongovernmental organizations, scientists, and multinational corporations have in recent decades created an unprecedented set of laws and institutions intended to help solve large-scale environmental problems. The book critically examines the serious shortcomings of current efforts and the underlying reasons why disturbing trends persist. It presents key concepts in international law and regime formation in simple, accessible language, and describes the current institutional landscape as well as lessons learned and new directions needed in international governance. Global Environmental Governance is a concise guide, with lists of key terms, study questions, and other features designed to help readers think about and understand the concepts discussed.

'This book is an important contribution to the relationship between international law and politics. . . highly recommended to scholars working at the interface of international environmental law and politics, particularly those with a solid theoretical grounding. . . Akhtarkhavari's Global Governance of the Environment should be required reading for advanced students of international environmental law and politics, whatever their concern.' - Simon Marsden, Review of European Community and International Environmental Law

This handbook is an advanced level reference guide which provides a comprehensive and contemporary overview of the corpus of international environmental law (IEL).

International Environmental Governance: Towards UNEPO offers a significant contribution to practitioners and scholars involved in international debates on environmental governance, addresses the law-making challenge presented by growth in MEAs and proliferation of international environmental institutions and thoroughly considers the need for and efficacy of global governance in the field of environment.

Situating the global poverty divide as an outgrowth of European imperialism, this book investigates current global divisions on environmental policy.

The ecosystem approach, broadly understood as a legal and governance strategy for integrated environmental and biodiversity management, has been adopted within a wide variety of international environmental legal regimes and provides a narrative, a policy approach and in some cases legally binding obligations for States to implement what has been called a ‘new paradigm’ of environmental management. In this last respect, the ecosystem approach is also often considered to offer an opportunity to move beyond the outdated anthropocentric framework underpinning much of international environmental law, thus helping re-think law in the Anthropocene. Against this background, this book addresses the question of whether the ecosystem approach represents a paradigm shift in international environmental law and governance, or whether it is in conceptual and operative continuity with legal modernity. This central question is explored through a combined genealogical and biopolitical framework, which reveals how the ecosystem approach is the result of multiple contingencies and contestations, and of the interplay of divergent and sometimes irreconcilable ideological projects. The ecosystem approach, this books shows, does not have a univocal identity, and must be understood as both signalling the potential for a decisive shift in the philosophical orientation of law and the operationalisation of a biopolitical framework of control that is in continuity with, and even intensifies, the eco-destructive tendencies of legal modernity. It is, however, in revealing this disjunction that the book opens up the possibility of moving beyond the already tired assessment of environmental law through the binary of anthropocentrism and ecocentrism.