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Introduction
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September 1987 - present
Education
September 1979 - December 1986
MIT
Field of study
- Political Science
Publications
Publications (86)
The global environmental awareness and regulatory process has covered a trajectory of 50 years. From the innocent times of the first 1972 UN Conference on the Human Environment (UNCHE), the world has travelled very far. It has encompassed a veritable process comprising role of actors, polarizing issues such as balancing of environment-development,...
This piece looks at the prospects for implementing the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). It analyzes the social infrastructure — the political and institutional processes — by which more effective governance is possible. It appraises the role of different international organizations in delivering each SDG on its own, as well as t...
The global environmental awareness and regulatory process has covered a trajectory of 50 years. From the innocent times of the first 1972 UN Conference on the Human Environment (UNCHE), the world has travelled very far. It has encompassed a veritable process comprising role of actors, polarizing issues such as balancing of environment-development,...
We need new analytical tools to understand the turbulent times in which we live, and identify the directions in which international politics will evolve. This volume discusses how engaging with Emanuel Adler's social theory of cognitive evolution could potentially achieve these objectives. Eminent scholars of International Relations explore various...
Complexity is the new global ontology for world politics. This article summarizes the characteristics of complexity and its implications for informed US state policy making. We conclude with some suggestions about administrative reforms to improve US policy making to address global complexity.
The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the Paris Agreement on climate are the key international agreements to deliver a sustainable future. They are a compromise between the scientifically necessary and politically possible to achieve global sustainability. Agreed in 2015, they constitute a radical departure for international policy with no p...
The Montreal Protocol is regarded as an example of effective environmental governance—setting the stratospheric ozone hole on the road to recovery by coordinating science, multilateral funding, and private-sector innovation. How robust is the Protocol to emerging threats, and what lessons can it offer for climate governance?
This forum traces the emergence of international negotiations as study sites in the field of global environmental politics, from its early days until the present. It sets the scene for the research articles in this special section, outlining why their contributions are timely, and takes advantage of advances in methods and conceptual analysis. The...
This collection of essays brings together scholars from various disciplinary backgrounds, based on three continents, with different theoretical and methodological interests but all active on the topic of complex systems as applied to international relations. They investigate how complex systems have been and can be applied in practice and what diff...
Increasing demand for solution-oriented environmental assessments brings significant opportunities and challenges at the science–policy–society interface. Solution-oriented assessments should enable inclusive deliberative learning processes about policy alternatives and their practical consequences.
This chapter lays out a research agenda to assess conditions, challenges, and prospects for the Sustainable Development Goals to pursue this aim. First, the chapter discusses goal setting as a global governance strategy. Second, to contextualize the Sustainable Development Goals, it discusses the unique nature of the modern challenges that the Sust...
This chapter analyzes how topics are identified for the SDGs, the prospects for effective linkages between the individual topics, and longer term learning about managing complex issues. It compares the logics of substantive and tactical issues linkage. Empirically it looks at the presence or absence or epistemic communities as factors contributing...
The effectiveness and influence of solutions oriented global environmental assessments (SOAs) rests on their legitimacy. Based on the GEA literature this piece reviews the legitimacy of GEAs and discusses its implications, and challenges and for the legitimacy of SOAs. This article is part of a special issue on solution-oriented GEAs.
The Politics of Expertise: Competing for Authority in Global Governance. By Sending Ole Jacob . Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2015. 174p. $70.00 cloth, $19.95 paper. - Volume 15 Issue 1 - Peter M. Haas
What are the prospects for effective global governance? It is widely held that global governance is a public good, but what are the political factors that are likely to ensure its provision? Is the USA able or willing to able to provide it? Can international institutions, norms, or causal beliefs, in the absence of US leadership, fill in?
This chapter reviews the dynamics by which policy agendas are assembled at the international level, and then assesses the prospects for creating a meaningful set of Sustainable Development Goals at the United Nations. Keywords Epistemic community • Sustainable development • Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) • Millennium Development Goals (MDGs)...
Experts are increasingly relied on in decision-making processes at international and European levels. Their involvement in those processes, however, is contested. This timely book on the role of 'experts' provides a broad-gauged analysis of the issues raised by their involvement in decision-making processes. The chapters explore three main recurrin...
The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority...
Policy Brief #4 Key Messages: 1. The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) require appropriate institutional support to integrate them effectively into institutions and practices, to coordinate activities, and to mobilize resources for implementation. The High-Level Political Forum on Sustainable Development (HLPF) can be a lead " orchestrator of or...
The United Nations conference in Rio de Janeiro in June is an important opportunity to improve the institutional framework for sustainable development.
The current institutional framework for sustainable development is by far not strong enough to bring about the swift transformative progress that is needed. This article contends that incrementalism—the main approach since the 1972 Stockholm Conference—will not suffice to bring about societal change at the level and speed needed to mitigate and ada...
This article assesses the prospects for advancing to a green economy at Rio Plus 20 through the perspective of international political economy writings on economic transformations and regime governance. In order to achieve robust investment in revolutionary new technologies a clear international political project is required that provides a common...
Science assessments indicate that human activities are moving several of Earth's sub-systems outside the range of natural variability typical for the previous 500,000 years (1, 2). Human societies must now change course and steer away from critical tipping points in the Earth system that might lead to rapid and irreversible change (3). This require...
As the world becomes more globalised, decision makers grow uncertain about what their interests are and how best to achieve them, and ideas become increasingly important as maps or frames for decision makers in an unfamiliar setting. With the end of the Cold War, decision makers cannot rely on geopolitical doctrines as a guide for various areas of...
The contribution of the application of the political science literature and usable knowledge regarding the solution and management of environmental issues and the creation of multilateral environmental regimes is discussed in this chapter. With the involvement of scientific bodies, the authors have identified the conditions suitable for the establi...
Las Relaciones Internacionales carecen de una teoría y un juego de explicaciones creíble sobre el origen de las instituciones internacionales, los intereses estatales y el comportamiento de los estados en condiciones de incertidumbre. En este volumen no sólo desarrollamos “estudios particulares que (…) pueden iluminar asuntos importantes en la polí...
It is a long and winding road from Bali to a meaningful climate change regime. The “Bali Roadmap” is singularly indistinct in its details. Because the stakes are extremely high, we are unlikely to see any diplomatic breakthroughs in the negotiations until the very last minute. Consequently, I argue in this piece that the next year or so can be frui...
International Law and Organization: Closing the Compliance Gap. Edited by Edward C. Luck and Michael W. Doyle. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004. Pp. viii, 348. $97, $37.95. - Volume 102 Issue 1 - Peter M. Haas
This piece reviews alternative reform proposals for international environmental governance, and the role of the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) in a new international environmental architecture. It argues for streamlining UNEP as a scientific hub within a broader international network of linked actors involved in environmental governance.
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, biodiv...
This article investigates the role played by formal international institutions in the broader process of international efforts to respond to and manage global and transboundary environmental risks. Because few international institutions are designed to deal with the broad nature of environmental risks, it focuses on institutional learning. By analy...
While speaking truth to power has long been a major theme in political science and policy studies, commentators are increasingly skeptical about whether modelers and scientists are capable of developing truth, and whether power ever listens to them anyhow. This paper asks when does power listen to truth, and what lessons may be drawn from the last...
There is mounting concern about a global governance deficit for managing international environmental problems and sustainable development. This article reviews the proposals and justifications for reform, and suggests an alternative model of global governance based on diffuse networks of diverse actors performing multiple and overlapping functions....
Fax: +49 30 86880-100; Office@Ecologic.de Berlin provides a perfect metaphor for global environmental governance –a piece of literary indulgence in the spirit of Heinrich Boll. Political reality here has not always corresponded to geographical reality. Or, as the Brundtland Commission report wrote, "The globe is one, but the earth is not." The chal...
This book evaluates the impact on state behaviour of international norms adopted in forms that are not legally binding. The use of such ‘soft law’ has increased dramatically with the proliferation of international organizations. Whether and how such norms can be used effectively to supplement or substitute for legally binding obligations forms the...
This article provides a pragmatic constructivist approach for progressing study in International Relations (IR) that sidesteps the ontological differences between major IR approaches, and that is capable of influencing practices in international relations. In particular, it looks at how international institutions can be studied and the possible con...
This essay reviews Malthusian themes in current discourses about resource scarcity and environmental security. It argues that these themes are unjustifiably dominant in current discussions, and suggests that increased attention should be to paid to discourses revolving around Sustainable Development, as well as on institutional designs that can inf...
Epistemic communities are one of the principal actors responsible for aggregating and articulating knowledge in terms of state interests for decision makers, and disseminating those beliefs internationally. In a broader political context, epistemic communities provide one of the major channels by which overarching regime principles, norms and rules...
Implementation, the subject of this chapter, is action to realize a strategy or fulfill a purpose. It is concerned with giving faithful effect to declarations, putting decisions into motion, and selecting and carrying through a course of action intended to achieve identified (not necessarily announced) objectives.
What are the prospects for effective regional action to protect the NW Pacific from environmental harm? The article reviews governance lessons from existing regional marine protection regimes, in order to derive lessons for effective regional environmental protection. Prominent factors influencing effective regional environmental protection include...
What are the prospects for effective regional action to protect the NW Pacific from environmental harm? The article reviews governance lessons from existing regional marine protection regimes, in order to derive lessons for effective regional environmental protection. Prominent factors influencing effective regional environmental protection include...
The European Union (EU) has issued hundreds if not thousands of directives and decisions over the last twenty-five years. Yet questions of compliance — to what extent do states comply, which states are likely to comply, what patterns of compliance exist within and across areas of regulation? — have not been extensively investigated and remain poorl...
Innovation policy is increasingly informed from the perspective of a national innovation system (NIS), but, despite the fact that research findings emphasize the importance of national differences in the framing conditions for innovation, policy prescriptions tend to be uniform. Justifications for innovation policy by organizations such as the OECD...
Describes documents produced at the United Nations Conference and the Global Forum: The Rio Declaration, a statement of broad principles to guide national conduct on environmental protection and development; treaties on climate change and biodiversity; forest principles statement; and Agenda 21, a presentation of work plans for sustainable developm...
The growing technical uncertainties and complexities of problems of global concern have made international policy coordination not only increasingly necessary but also increasingly difficult. If decision makers are unfamiliar with the technical aspects of a specific problem, how do they define state interests and develop viable solutions? What fact...
Studies in this issue show that the epistemic communities approach amounts to a progressive research program with which students of world politics can empirically study the role of reason and ideas in international relations. By focusing on epistemic communities, analysts may better understand how states come to recognize interests under conditions...
How decision makers define state interests and formulate policies to deal with complex and technical issues can be a function of the manner in which the issues are represented by specialists to whom they turn for advice in the face of uncertainty. The contributors to this issue examine the role that networks of knowledge-based experts--epistemic co...
An overview of accomplishments from the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED); the "Earth Summit," held June 3-14, 1992 in Rio de Janerio, Brazil. Examines outcomes of the UNCED process in four central areas: new institutions, national reporting measures, financial mechanisms, and heightened public and nongovernmental org...
A study of the collective regulation of chemicals which threaten the stratospheric ozone layer sheds light on the questions of how states recognize problems which had not previously been clearly indicated, the politics of actual standard setting, and the role of scientific understanding. Costly choices have been made without absolute scientific con...
It is widely accepted that transboundary pollution problems require international co-operation for their solution, because many countries suffer the effects of such degradation and no country is unilaterally capable of managing the issue. While most environmental issues share these characteristics, which inhibit their resolution internationally, th...
As a poor, developing country, Egypt faces a wide variety of pollution and other environmental problems associated with poverty. In this essay are reviewed the most severe environmental problems currently facing Egypt, as well as the range of policies which the government has assayed in order to manage them. Some of the widespread environmental pro...
International regimes have received increasing attention in the literature on international relations. However, little attention has been systematically paid to how compliance with them has been achieved. An analysis of the Mediterranean Action Plan, a coordinated effort to protect the Mediterranean Sea from pollution, shows that this regime actual...
the twenty-first century, suggests renowned biologist E. O. Wilson, will be the age of the environment. 1 Despite the convenience of millennial accounting, this age started earlier—with the 1972 UN Conference on the Human Environment (UNCHE), when the international community first became aware of the widespread impact of human behavior on the natur...
Preface This paper is part of series of working papers that represents one of the first outputs from a two-year United Nations University Institute of Advanced Studies project on International Environmental Governance Reform, being conducted in collaboration with Kitakyushu University, Japan, and with support from The Japan Foundation Center for Gl...
Projects
Projects (2)
With Norichika Kanie of Keio University and many other colleagues, I have just concluded a book project on Sustainable Development Goals, which will be published around April 2017 with MIT Press; Norichika and I will continue our collaboration on this topic.
The Earth System Governance Project is a long-term international research programme that was originally set up as a Core Project of the International Human Dimensions Programme on Global Environmental Change (IHDP). In 2015, the Project has become part of the new global umbrella programme ‘Future Earth’. The Earth System Governance Project’s Science Plan is implemented since 2009 through a new global network of affiliated researchers, including about 300 research fellows and 50 lead faculty members; a global series of annual open science conferences, with events in Amsterdam (2007, 2009), Colorado (2011), Lund (2012), Tokyo (2013), East Anglia (2014), Australian National University (2015) and Nairobi (2016); a global alliance of Earth System Governance Research Centres; a global network of task forces, affiliated projects, and smaller events; and a network of social media outlets, internet fora and affiliated publication series, including with MIT Press. The international project office is hosted by Lund University, Sweden. See www.earthsystemgovernance.org for more information.
