Sikina JinnahUniversity of California, Santa Cruz | UCSC · Department of Politics
Sikina Jinnah
MS, PhD
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71
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886
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Introduction
Additional affiliations
July 2016 - present
August 2009 - present
June 2008 - June 2009
Publications
Publications (71)
The stringency of the 1.5 degree goal under the Paris Agreement, coupled with the mismatch between that goal and domestic mitigation pledges, inevitably directs attention onto the potential future role of solar radiation management (SRM) technologies. Such technologies, however, remain controversial, and analysis of their environmental, social and...
In order to advance a neatly deductive argument, Christopher J. Preston must make a number of assumptions and framing decisions that exclude important practical points from the scope of his analysis. We do not criticize him for doing so, as these simplifications allow him to advance a concise argument about an ethically complex subject. However, as...
Secretariats—the administrative arms of international treaties—would seem simply to do the bidding of member states. And yet, Sikina Jinnah argues in Post-Treaty Politics, secretariats can play an important role in world politics. On paper, secretariats collect information, communicate with state actors, and coordinate diplomatic activity. In pract...
Environmental provisions are included into bilateral trade agreements in increasingly creative ways. This article offers an initial exploration of the policy and legal dimensions of environmental provisions included in recent bilateral trade agreements concluded by the United States and by the European Union. Based primarily on a coding analysis of...
This article builds on recent scholarship that explores the nature of secretariat influence in global governance. By combining data from interviews with WTO delegates and secretariat staff with document analysis, this study examines how the WTO secretariat is shaping trade-environment politics by using its bureaucratic authority to influence overla...
This perspective article argues that anticipatory research into possible “emergency” response measures such as solar geoengineering will increase knowledge, and thus confidence, in any future decisions to either deploy or reject these technologies. Similarities between COVID and climate can reveal some perspective on the benefits of anticipatory va...
Over the past decades, the growing proliferation of international institutions governing the global environment has impelled institutional interplay as a result of functional and norma-tive overlap across multiple regimes. This article synthesizes primary contributions made in research on institutional interplay over the past twenty years, with par...
Pandemics and environmental degradation are both deadly global crises, which often disproportionately impact the world’s most vulnerable populations. The scale of devastation for both pandemics and environmental problems can also be immense. The political science literature often assumes that policymakers rationally design governance systems accord...
We propose a conceptual framework to explain why some technologies are more difficult to govern than others in global environmental governance. We start from the observation that some technologies pose transboundary environmental risks, some provide capacities for managing such risks, and some do both. For “ambiguous” technologies, potential risks...
Faculty diversity is an important driver of student success, especially for students of color. Yet, faculty diversity has not kept pace with the increase in student diversity within US 4-year postsecondary institutions. While students of color make up 42.5% of this population, faculty of color only constitute 24.4%. This study empirically examines...
The renegotiation of what US President Trump called “the worst trade deal ever” has resulted in the most detailed environmental chapter in any trade agreement in history. The United States–Mexico–Canada Agreement (USMCA) reaffirms the approach to environmental protection under the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), but also mentions dozen...
This article adds conceptual discipline to a well‐rehearsed but largely intuitive argument within the climate engineering community that carbon dioxide removal (CDR) and solar radiation management (SRM) should be treated separately – ‘split’ rather than ‘lumped’ – in policy discussions. Specifically, we build the first, theoretically derived argume...
This article identifies diverse rationales to call for anticipatory governance of solar geoengineering, in light of a climate crisis. In focusing on governance rationales, we step back from proliferating debates in the literature on ‘how, when, whom, and where’ to govern, to address the important prior question of why govern solar geoengineering in...
Architectures of Earth System Governance - edited by Frank Biermann May 2020
Combating climate change and transitioning to fossil-free energy are two central and interdependent challenges facing humanity today. Governing the nexus of these challenges is complex, and includes multiple intergovernmental and transnational institutions. This book analyses the governance interactions between such institutions, and explores their...
This chapter explores the ideas and debates which shape global environmental politics. At least three types of socially constructed ideas play a key role in international environmental governance: world views, causal beliefs, and social norms. However, ideas are not universally shared, which means that ideological clashes are a feature of global en...
This chapter examines how states have very different preferences in global environmental politics. These state preferences are formed and shaped in a co-evolving process at both the domestic and international levels. Domestically, a rational choice analysis shows how environmental vulnerability and the costs of abatement contribute to defining a st...
This chapter discusses the complex and multifaceted relationship between science and politics. Although science and politics each follow a distinct logic and pursue distinct objectives, they are inextricably connected to one another. On the one hand, science influences political debates, by drawing attention to certain problems and providing necess...
This chapter focuses on non-state actors in global environmental governance. Non-state actors, such as non-governmental organisations (NGOs), corporations, and transnational networks, play an increasingly significant role in global environmental politics. Some of them, such as Greenpeace and Shell, became well known by communicating directly with t...
This chapter addresses environmental protection and economic development. These two policy objectives are at once contradictory and complementary; they cannot be considered separately as one necessarily affects the other. The chapter adopts a historical approach and studies how interactions between these two policy objectives have been understood s...
This chapter looks at intergovernmental organisations and international regimes. As several environmental problems have transnational implications, governments have been eager to establish international institutions to address these problems collectively. In the aftermath of the landmark 1972 Stockholm Summit on the Human Environment, states create...
This chapter assesses the rights governing access to globally shared natural resources, such as fish stocks, deep seabed minerals, and clean air. The international system is based on the principle of national sovereignty, which says that each state has absolute, perpetual, and exclusive rights within its national territory. This construction does n...
This chapter discusses the relationship between the environment and security. The concept of ‘environmental security’ is omnipresent, but is nonetheless ambiguous and contested. What exactly needs to be secured, and what are the security threats? Is environmental security about state security, faced with the loss of natural resources? Or is it abou...
This chapter explores the complex and multifaceted relationship between international trade and environmental protection. The global trade regime's normative principles, legal rules, and real-world consequences often contradict environmental governance. For example, there is tension between trade and environmental governance with respect to the com...
This chapter introduces several debates surrounding the effectiveness of global environmental governance. These debates are closely linked to the choice of policy instruments states make within international regimes. These public policy instruments include regulations, administrative standards, scientific indicators, financial targets, and accounti...
As trade negotiations within the World Trade Organization seem permanently stalled, countries turn increasingly to preferential trade agreements (PTAs) between smaller groups of nations. Many of these PTAs incorporate environmental provisions, some of which require trading partners to enact new domestic environmental laws, and use the enforcement m...
Global Environmental Politics provides a comprehensive introduction to the key concepts, theories, methods, and debates in environmental politics. The authors' analytical approach encourages students to critique a wide variety of political perspectives, equipping them with the necessary tools to develop their own arguments and opinions.
Adopts an...
Governments disagree even on the current state of climate change engineering governance, as became clear at the 2019 United Nations Environment Assembly negotiations. They must develop mechanisms to provide policy-relevant knowledge, clarify uncertainties and head off potential distributional impacts.
The renegotiation of what US President Trump called “the worst trade deal ever” has resulted in the most detailed environmental chapter in any trade agreement in history. The USMCA mentions dozens of environmental issues that its predecessor, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), overlooked, and in line with contemporary US practice, bri...
Solar radiation management (SRM) technologies would reflect a small amount of incoming solar radiation back into space before the radiation can warm the planet. Although SRM may emerge as a useful component of a global response to climate change, there is also good reason for caution. In June 2017, the Academic Working Group on Climate Engineering...
Two recently proposed solar radiation management (SRM) experiments in the United States have highlighted the need for governance mechanisms to guide SRM research. This paper draws on the literatures on legitimacy in global governance, responsible innovation, and experimental governance to argue that public engagement is a necessary (but not suffici...
This article is accepted and forthcoming in Environmental Politics.
Despite the important risks, uncertainties, and potentials surrounding emerging climate engineering technologies, governance of these technologies is lacking. This article asks: how can rationales underlying governance demand for climate engineering technologies inform strategies for governance design? It posits that demand rationales can be couple...
The regulatory contribution that preferential trade agreements (PTAs) make to global climate governance is assessed through an analysis of climate-related provisions found in 688 PTAs signed between 1947 and 2016. Provisions are analyzed along four dimensions: innovation, legalization, replication, and distribution. Innovative climate provisions ar...
In order to advance a neatly deductive argument, Christopher J. Preston must make a number of assumptions and framing decisions that exclude important practical points from the scope of his analysis. We do not criticize him for doing so, as these simplifications allow him to advance a concise argument about an ethically complex subject. However, as...
How do environmental norms and policies diffuse across borders? In this article, we argue that preferential trade agreements (PTAs) can play an important role in this process. Specifically, we argue that the US has long used PTAs as mechanisms to diffuse such norms, and show this through an empirical examination of three US PTAs, each froma distinc...
Humanity is, through the production of widespread environmental harm, in the act of producing a "New Earth" on which the human signature is everywhere and in desperate need of humane and insightful guidance. This chapter unpacks some of the environmental features of the Anthropocene era. It then examines the challenges and opportunities associated...
Humanity’s collective impact on the Earth is vast. The rate and scale of human-driven environmental destruction is quickly outstripping our political and social capacities for managing it. We are in effect creating an Earth 2.0 on which the human signature is everywhere, a “new earth” in desperate need of humane and insightful guidance. In this vol...
Mechanisms of norm and policy diffusion from the international- to the regional- and domestic levels
have garnered much attention in recent years. We know less, however, about how norms
and policies “trickle-up,” or diffuse in the opposite direction. Although the “internationalization”
of domestic norms and policies helps us to understand how diffu...
This paper examines how overlap between trade and environmental issues are managed under the North American Free Trade Agreement, and specifically the role of that the Commission for Environmental Cooperation (CEC) Secretariat plays in this process. We demonstrate how the CEC Secretariat has influenced trade-environment politics, primarily through...
This chapter explains why the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) Secretariat, an otherwise influencial secretairat, failed to influence political outcomes in this case. The chapter illuminates the CITES Secretariat's efforts to manage overlap with the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) on issues surrounding comm...
This chapter analyzes the World Trade Organization (WTO) Secretariat's overlap management activities through two nested cases of trade-environment overlap management. It argues that the Secretariat helped create shared understandings of overlap management needs and redistributed capabilities among states to participate in overlap management politic...
The first of four empirical case studies, this chapter applies the two-pronged analytical framework introduced in Chapter 3 to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) Secretariat's overlap management activities within the biodiversity regime complex. It argues that the CBD Secretariat was able to influence overlap management in the mid-1990s t...
This case study continues to examine the CBD Secretariat, but focuses on overlap management between the biodiversity and climate regimes. The case illuminates how the CBD's former Executive Secretary strategically filtered, framed, and reiterated (i.e. marketed) the relationship between biodiversity and climate change in a way that increased the po...
This chapter details what secretariats are through the lens of international relations theory and international law, focusing on secretariats that deal directly or indirectly with environmental issues. It draws from the domestic bureaucratic politics literature to explain why secretariats are essentially international bureaucracies. It discusses ho...
This chapter builds a theory of secretariat influence and presents the two-pronged analytical framework that is used in subsequent chapters to evaluate secretariat influence. In constructing this framework the chapter disentagles the relationship between power, authority, and influence, and identifes new sources of authority and mechanisms of influ...
The entrée of climate change politics to the center stage of international relations has been accompanied by broad range of strategic linkages, which have produced various institutional interactions. This special issue takes stock of the wide range of ways that international regimes are strategically linked to climate change politics. We do this wi...
In this article I argue that, the Secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), led by its autonomously entrepreneurial Executive Secretary, influences overlap management by strategically linking biodiversity and climate change issues. Specifically, the Secretariat marketed (filtered, framed, and reiterated) strategic frames of the b...
Recently negotiated linkages between trade and environmental agreements have the potential to enhance environmental regime effectiveness in ways that have been impossible under environmental treaties alone. Specifically, the 2009 U.S.—Peru Trade Promotion Agreement (TPA) contains the most prescriptive environmental directives found in any U.S. trad...
This chapter discusses lessons learned from existing ecosystem service projects in the context of supporting an effective, efficient and equitable reduced emission from deforestation and degradation (REDD) framework under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). Despite significant parallels between the two programs, to d...
This letter aims to help scholars and practitioners alike prepare for the 15th Conference of
the Parties (COP15) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change
(UNFCCC), to be held in Copenhagen in December 2009, by providing a bird's eye view of
the increasingly complex terrain of the global climate negotiations. It identifies and
ex...
As the rules for foreign access to biological resources are being negotiated, academic researchers and organizations should make their opinions known.
Projects
Projects (6)
2014. Post-treaty Politics: Secretariat Influence in Global Environmental Governance. MIT Press.
I will be posting reviews, chapters, and articles related to my 2014 book under this project heading.
This project will result in a Special Issue of the journal Environmental Politics (pending peer review).
Co-editors:
Sikina Jinnah, Simon Nicholson, Janos Pasztor
Expected Contributors:
Holly Buck, Ken Conca, Aarti Gupta, Prakash Kashwan, Catriona McKinnon, Ina Moller, Pablo Suarez, Toby Svoboda, Leslie Thiele, Paul Wapner
This paper presents a framework for near-term governance of solar radiation management (SRM) technologies, a topic which is quickly gaining legitimacy and impetus. The IPCC, for instance, explicitly calls for examination of “governance, ethical, and equity impacts of negative emission technologies and other geoengineering options” in its scoping document for the forthcoming special report on 1.5°C (2016b, 10). The resulting IPCC Outline for the Special Report also invites assessment of SRM in, for example, its call for assessing negative emission technologies and “associated opportunities and challenges” (Chapter 4). This growing scientific and political interest, coupled with expectations for backsliding from at least one major emitter (at least) over the next four years, make it increasingly likely that SRM becomes more central to international discussions of climate change response options in the near future. Yet, SRM governance discussions remain wholly inadequate to handle this possibility, posing, we argue, an irresponsible risk to society and the global environment. Arguing that SRM, if pursued, should be part of a broader mitigation framework, we analyse the potential of existing institutions to govern SRM. We identify characteristics of SRM that may require near-term governance and evaluate how existing institutions could fill that governance space. Ultimately, we argue that a multi-nodal, coordinated system of international governance that involves several institutions addressing interrelated aspects of SRM governance, is not just likely for SRM, reflecting the emergent state of global governance more broadly, but is also desirable.
