Henrik Selin

• Boston University

The 50th anniversary of the 1972 United Nations Conference on the Human Environment provides an opportunity to reflect on mercury pollution as a sustainability issue past, present, and future. Scientists and policy-makers recognize that mercury is connected to multiple sustainability challenges, but a more comprehensive understanding of global merc...

The field of sustainability science has grown significantly over the past two decades in terms of both conceptual development and empirical research. Systems-focused analysis is critical to building generalizable knowledge in the field, yet much relevant research does not take a systems view. Systems-oriented analytical frameworks can help research...

Private standards play an increasingly important governance role, yet their effects on state‐led policymaking remain understudied. We examine how the operation of private agricultural standards influences multilateral pesticide governance with a particular focus on the listing of substances under the Rotterdam Convention on the Prior Informed Conse...

Neither international treaties nor domestic policies control carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from international shipping. To enhance mitigation, a new multilateral mechanism could allocate these emissions to national carbon budgets, where different options could be used based on the location of industry actors and ships. We analyze five allocation o...

Mercury is a global pollutant that has been emitted and released into the environment from numerous human activities including coal combustion, artisanal gold mining, mining of other metals, and chemical production, resulting in the elevated exposure of humans and wildlife throughout the world. Mercury contamination has been recognized by the inter...

The Minamata Convention on Mercury, with its objective to protect human health and the environment from the dangers of mercury (Hg), entered into force in 2017. The Convention outlines a life-cycle approach to the production, use, emissions, releases, handling, and disposal of Hg. As it moves into the implementation phase, scientific work and infor...

The European Union (EU) is influential in environmental politics and policy-making across its 28 member states, around its periphery, and globally. Building on a diverse analytical and empirical literature, this article's seven sections each highlights important research findings and outcomes from more than four decades of EU environmental governan...

In global environmental cooperation, legally binding agreements remain a customary way for states to set common goals and standards. This article analyzes the Minamata Convention on Mercury by addressing three questions: First, how did linkages to earlier agreements shape the negotiations? Second, what were the main legal and political issues durin...

The United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development, more widely known as 'Rio+20', was a significant global political event, but it left many important questions relating to the future of sustainability governance unanswered. This paper introduces a theme issue on "Governing sustainability: Rio+20 and the road beyond". It is organized around...

The United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development (UNCSD) was mandated to focus on: (i) institutional frameworks for sustainable development and (ii) the green economy in the context of sustainable development and poverty eradiation. Analyzing the UNSCD from a historical perspective, we address three questions. First, what is the role of UN...

Prior to the Nixon administration, environmental policy in the United States was rudimentary at best. Since then, it has evolved into one of the primary concerns of governmental policy from the federal to the local level. As scientific expertise on the environment rapidly developed, Americans became more aware of the growing environmental crisis th...

As global environmental governance evolves, the parties to the 1989 Basel Convention on the Control of Transboundary Movements of Hazardous Wastes and Their Disposal and to the 2001 Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants have established regional centers working on capacity building and technology transfer. This article empirically e...

Introduction Human activities and their many byproducts are changing the climate of our planet. These changes, like the contributions of different countries and communities to climate change, vary substantially around the world. Every year, the average US citizen pushes almost 20 tons of carbon into the atmosphere, while Europeans, Chinese, and Ind...

This contribution is based on a set of reflections presented at the REGov Workshop. These reflections were offered as part of a panel discussion around the topic "Regional economic dynamics and the environment." Additional presentations provided in the context of this panel discussion include those of Wilbert van Roij, Aidenvironment, and W. Scott...

Experts offer theoretical and empirical analyses that view the regulation of transboundary air pollution as a dynamic process. Governing the Air looks at the regulation of air pollution not as a static procedure of enactment and agreement but as a dynamic process that reflects the shifting interrelationships of science, policy, and citizens. Taking...

This report is a collection of essays and recommendations related to the the future os sustainable development and global environmental governance.

The aim of the present study is to describe and analyze the character of the interplay between environmental science and policy-making in the process of identifying persistent organic pollutants (POPs) for initial inclusion in the POPs Protocol under the Convention on Long-Range Transboundary Air Pollution (CLRTAP). The objective of the CLRTAP POPs...

The United States is often identified as a global laggard on climate change policymaking and implementation. Although this reputation may be deserved by the US federal government, a look across all levels of the US federal political system and a multitude of political actors demonstrates the existence of a significant number of climate change and e...

Analysis of climate change policy innovations across North America at transnational, federal, state, and local levels, involving public, private, and civic actors. North American policy responses to global climate change are complex and sometimes contradictory and reach across multiple levels of government. For example, the U.S. federal government...

This chapter examines climate change measures in the Northeast North America. It seeks to uncover how regional institutions and policy networks, along with the public, private, and civil society sectors, are taking on significant leadership roles in pioneering climate change policymaking and implementation. The chapter also explains the important a...

This chapter examines the causes and possible implications of climate change-associated political action in North America, from continental to governance levels. It aims to explore four broad questions in North American climate change that are essential in understanding the developments in North America's climate change policy making and politics:...

Analysis of climate change policy innovations across North America at transnational, federal, state, and local levels, involving public, private, and civic actors. North American policy responses to global climate change are complex and sometimes contradictory and reach across multiple levels of government. For example, the U.S. federal government...

Analysis of climate change policy innovations across North America at transnational, federal, state, and local levels, involving public, private, and civic actors. North American policy responses to global climate change are complex and sometimes contradictory and reach across multiple levels of government. For example, the U.S. federal government...

Analysis of climate change policy innovations across North America at transnational, federal, state, and local levels, involving public, private, and civic actors. North American policy responses to global climate change are complex and sometimes contradictory and reach across multiple levels of government. For example, the U.S. federal government...

This article was submitted without an abstract, please refer to the full-text PDF file.

This article reviews the international legal framework on hazardous substances, with an emphasis on the Arctic and the roles of indigenous peoples. Persistent organic pollutants (POPs) and heavy metals pose significant risks to Arctic indigenous populations, mainly through the consumption of traditional foods. Treaties of particular relevance inclu...

The European Union (EU) has greatly expanded its environmental legislation over the past two decades. This article analyzes the recent development of the REACH (Registration, Evaluation and Authorization of Chemicals) regulation. It uses a process-tracing technique to explore the question of how REACH was created despite signifıcant resistan...

1. Enlarging EU Environments: Central and Eastern Europe from Transition to Accession 2. Environmental Protection in an Expanding European Community: Lessons from Past Accessions 3. Differential Effects of Enlargement on EU Environmental Governance 4. Environmental Implications of Eastern Enlargement: The End of Progressive EU Environmental Policy?...

This article analyzes how U.S. climate change politics and policy making are changing in the public, private and civil society sectors, and how such changes are likely to influence U.S. federal policies. It outlines the current status of U.S. climate change action and explores four overlapping pathways of policy change: (1) the strategic demonstrat...

Many electrical and electronic products contain substances that are hazardous to human and ecosystem health, making their disposal a difficult but increasingly important task. The European Union has issued some influential directives to reduce e-waste and prevent hazardous substances from reaching the waste stream.

This article analyses international legal and policy developments on mercury from the 1970s to the present time, and examines options for continued abatement. Multiple scientific assessments have demonstrated that mercury is an environmental pollutant that can pose a serious threat to human health and development. Currently, the international commu...

In the recent years, global environmental change research has seen increased attention to the concept of vulnerability. There have been a growing number of vulnerability assessments, but relatively little discussion on appropriate and common methods. Here we propose a methodology to guide vulnerability assessments of coupled human-environment syste...

Canadian-U.S. environmental relations manifest a growing importance of transborder state and provincial cooperation and policy-making. This trend is clear in North American climate change action. Though the Canadian and American federal governments have adopted diverging positions on climate change policy, extensive sub-national climate change acti...

The introduction into the Baltic Sea of hazardous substances that are persistent, bioaccumulate, and are toxic is an important environmental and human health problem. Multilateral efforts to address this problem have primarily been taken under the Helsinki Commission (HELCOM). This article examines past HELCOM efforts on hazardous substances, and d...

A paper by Holloway et al. reported that aerosols and O3 are regulary transported from Asia to North America, and from North America to Europe. It proposed the creation of a hemispheric pollution treaty, modeled after the Convention of Long-Range Transboundary Air Pollution. A review of the paper covers the difficulty of designing environmental ins...

The European Union has chosen the precautionary principle as a key guiding principle to achieve more effective policy-making on risks, by moving away from preventive regulation towards more precautionary regulation. Precaution-ary language has been a part of European Community law for over a decade; however, whether its establishment has had any re...

The Arctic is a remote and seemingly pristine environment, yet pollutants - including persistent organic pollutants such as PCBs and DDT, heavy metals such as mercury and cadmium, and radionuclides - have made their way to the region, often at harmful levels. The nations and organizations that govern the region all seem to agree on this fact, but i...

The vulnerability framework of the Research and Assessment Systems for Sustainability Program explicitly recognizes the coupled human-environment system and accounts for interactions in the coupling affecting the system's responses to hazards and its vulnerability. This paper illustrates the usefulness of the vulnerability framework through three c...

International measures to address environmental problems increasingly rely on scientific information, and a growing number of international agreements require periodic scientific re-assessments. However, the arena of scientific assessment, governed by a combination of scientific criteria and political interests, is not well-understood, and few case...

The growing literature about linkages between international institutions remains littered with proposed taxonomies. Most of these taxonomies are conceptual, rather than empirically driven, remaining too vague to offer guidance for empirical research regarding linkages as possible avenues of influence across international institutions. This article...

The European Union (EU) has greatly expanded its environmental legislation over the past two decades. This article analyzes the recent development of the REACH (Registration, Evaluation and Authorization of Chemicals) regulation. It uses a process-tracing technique to explore the question of how REACH was created despite signiªcant resistance from...

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