Seeking to contribute to the governance stream of this year’s Berlin Conference, the paper addresses an emerging phenomenon of global environmental governance: the increasing overlap and interplay among institutions that touch upon related subject matters. Presenting one of the first outcomes of the Earth System Governance project, the paper focuses on one specific case of institutional interplay, namely the overlap between the United Nations climate regime and the World Trade Organization (WTO). While parties of the UN climate regime discuss trade-related measures for a post-2012 agreement, WTO parties debate climate-related trade measures. This duplication of debates entails a lack of legal clarity, which may have detrimental implications for the further negotiation and implementation of both regimes. Drawing on neoliberal institutionalism and cognitivism, we identify two reasons for these interplay effects: the constellation of preferences and the lack of consensual knowledge on overlapping issues. Based on a workshop organized jointly with the UN Environment Programme, we developed suggestions to tackle these reasons. Policies could accommodate the lack of knowledge by means of flexible approaches, e.g. default values for border cost adjustments and ‘living lists’ of sustainability criteria for lifting trade barriers. With regard to the constellation of country preferences, a careful linkage of debates across arenas can produce additional trade-offs and break some of the deadlocks in which these discussions have ended up. On the other hand, the paper attends to the caveats and limits of such linkages.

Initiated in 2002 by the World Bank and the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD, www.agassessment.org) is an interesting experience of an international expertise process aiming at improving global governance for sustainable development. It aimed to understand how agricultural knowledge, technologies and sciences could contribute to reduce hunger and poverty, improve rural livelihoods and at the same time reach environmental objectives. It involved the large mobilization of international scientific expertise, but also the participation of a diversity of stakeholders, and a validation of reports by an intergovernmental plenary. The design of the process was inspired by other global assessments like the IPCC and the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment. Among these international assessments, IAASTD is particularly important as its focus on agriculture necessarily puts the stress on trade-offs and synergies between social and environmental implications of development. Assessing if and how IAASTD managed to reach its objectives will prove useful for other assessment processes, particularly in order to understand how social and economical controversies at the heart of the debate on sustainable development might be structured and dealt with by international expertise processes. Regarding the initial objectives of this assessment and its participatory approach, many analysts criticize IAASTD because it did not reach a consensus among all stakeholders. In this paper, we propose to consider also the alternative perspective of analysis, where this assessment serves an advocacy strategy for a new approach of global agriculture. In this alternative perspective, IAASTD can be considered successful. We also propose to consider that the difference between the two analytical frameworks can be useful in order to re-analyze recommendations for global assessments, and to reopen the diversity of the roles that expertise might play in global debates about environment and development where controversies are central.

Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM) forms the widely accepted ecosystem approach to manage water and its related resources in a sustainable way. Nevertheless its implementation is still lacking behind, especially in developing and transition countries which are often short of essential resources and face complex political dynamics. IWRM often requires a fundamental realignment of institutions and governance structures. This may lead to problems of fit and institutional interplay as particular challenges of multi-level governance. Against this background a case study of Mongolia was carried out, a transition country suffering from extreme climatic conditions and increasing depletion of its resources. While an attempt to introduce IWRM exists on paper, it is less clear how it will be made politically and institutionally applicable. A document review and stakeholder interviews were carried out in order understand progress and problems of introducing IWRM in Mongolia in the face of its transition and decentralization process. Problems of fit and interplay were identified as well as approaches for their solution. Results show that the decentralization itself has led to problems of fit and interplay. Attempts are underway to overcome problems of fit like the establishment of river basin councils which do now face challenges concerning their room for manoeuvre. Problems of interplay arise when it comes to the cooperation and coordination of numerous water related organisations which often leads to inconsistent water governance.

Hydrological changes such as variability in water availability, extreme events like floods and droughts or water pollution pose a serious challenge to effective management of internationally shared water resources – no matter whether they are induced by climate change, large infrastructure projects in the river basin or other forms of environmental change. To address these management challenges, many states have established transboundary River Basin Organization (RBOs). The purpose of this paper is to investigate the ability of such RBOs to respond to exogenous environmental and man-made changes by identifying institutional mechanisms and management practices that have been established by the respective institutions or their member states to react to transformations in the basins’ environment. Drawing on the literature of neoinstitutionalist theory and hydropolitics approaches, a comprehensive analytical framework is being developed. It consists of the following determinants of adaptation capacity: Membership structure, functional scope, decision-making mechanisms, data and information sharing, dispute-resolution mechanisms, finances and donor support. Subsequently, the framework is applied to two case studies, the Okavango and the Mekong River Basin. The paper concludes that the adaptation capacity of RBOs depends significantly on these factors, however, further research to quantify their respective impact and to test hypotheses on a larger number of cases is needed.

In 2002, the European Union enacted ambitious legislation on the design and endoflife treatment of electronic products. This paper explores the external effects of these laws on the California. The EU Directives on the Restriction of Hazardous Substances in Electrical and Electronic Equipment (RoHS) and on Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) influenced the introduction of similar regulation in other jurisdictions. This paper identifies the connections between EU and Californian e-waste legislation. It analyses the roles of interdependence and transatlantic learning and it outlines the systemic variables that shaped the diffusion of EU e-waste policy to California.

In demonstrating that and how international regimes facilitate the convergence of foreign policy positions, analysts typically depart from irregularities at the macro-level and focus on beneficial effects for cooperation. This paper shows, with reference to the post-Treaty negotiations on an “Access and Benefit-Sharing” regime under the Convention on Biological Diversity, that standard approaches to substantiating regime effects on the output dimension fail to capture “perverse” regime impacts on perpetuating disagreement and “positive” effects that are overshadowed by malign conditions for cooperation. While this shortcoming may be acceptable in making a case for institutional causation across cases, it severely limits the analytical purview when the goal is the evaluation of a specific regime’s performance under historical circumstances. This paper outlines the contours of an alternative, more inclusive approach to the “output effectiveness” of international regimes. It firmly locates the analytical focus on the state level to investigate regime impacts on changes in foreign-policy making irrespectively of their implications for and impacts on collective action. By drawing on bargaining theory and foreign policy analysis, causal pathways for regime influence can eventually be formalised that would not only provide a standardised framework for tracing specific regime effects of varying quality, but also allow for their comparative assessment within the same research design.

In a climate changing world, two of the greatest challenges of environmental and social governance are those of transforming our energy systems and creating more adaptive and democratic institutions. The shortcomings of current energy governance policies and practices are particularly evident in the continued support for the centralised burning of fossil fuels, with significant implications for emissions and environmental degradation. To date, research into energy governance has primarily focused on deliberative decision- and policy –making [1;2]. Participation-in-action and self- governance as an alternative governance strategy has been largely ignored. The result is that citizens are left feeling like “amateurs” who can play no other role than client in the civic process dominated by experts and the state [3]. In positioning participation-in-action as a more democratic form of governance and an emerging socially sustainable energy praxes, this paper reports on current research investigating a series of community energy projects in the UK. Informed by earlier work on barriers and incentives for community energy projects [4] and research into social enterprises, green citizenship and democracy [5;6], the key contribution of this paper is exploration of a new conceptual and methodological approach to community based energy governance centred on the notion of a systemic inquiry, which facilitates the development of governance activity models [7]. Understood in terms of associative democracy [8], governance activity models can be used to explore the key activities of community energy governance. This enables participant reflection on how and why community energy governance processes differ from command and control hierarchical governance structures typically found in corporations and government agencies. The paper concludes with an analysis of the role of community energy actors in governance processes, the key opportunities and limitations for the suggested approach and the changes to government policies and institutions required to support community governance of energy systems.

Although subsidizing policies are not highly evaluated in environmental economics since they are contrary to “The Polluter Pays Principle” and there is a budget constraint, many countries have in practice introduced several subsidizing policies and some of them have been effective in promoting investments to a certain degree. This paper explores the conditions under which subsidizing policies are effective in diffusing new technologies using a case of a Swedish subsidizing policy, “the local investment program” (LIP) 1998-2002. In the LIP scheme, municipalities make an investment program for environmental protection in their region and subsidies are granted to excellent programs after screening by the Swedish government. An investment program in general consists of several projects by municipal authorities, municipal companies, private companies and so on. One of the features of the LIP is that subsidies are granted to each project through municipalities, so in order for private companies, individuals and other organization to obtain subsidies their projects have to be included in a program by the municipality. Most projects would not have been implemented without LIP subsidies, so we could evaluate the LIP promoted additional investments. But there were not many projects using new technologies although it was at first one of the purposes of the LIP. The reasons could be attributed to the fact that the LIP subsidies were granted through municipalities and to win the race for subsidies municipalities tended to avoid including projects with high uncertainty in their program. The competition among municipalities, which had been considered to promote unique programs, might prevent municipalities from introducing projects with new technologies in this case.

The contemporary global ecological crisis has led developed and developing countries to put emphasis upon the need for relevant policies, for ecological purposes, at the national and international levels. However, little attention has been payed to the local acceptance, in the cultural and social frameworks of developing countries in particular, to the worldwide spread of these new ideological and political standards. Neither to the role of traditional lifestyles in preventing or increasing the climate changes. The issue of governance and especially the chance for new social attitudes towards nature and climate can be reframed by taking into account the tension between social structures and local cultures, on the one side, international economic and ecological issues, on the other side. The case of Nepal highlights the ways collective consciousness about climate change and the corresponding “sustainable” programs are depending upon the social and cultural acceptance, especially in poor Asian countries, of these worldwide exported standards. Based upon the study of national policies in the broader context of internationalization of ecological ideas and practices, this research explores a collection of ethnographic case studies, in remote villages of Nepal – and in Asia. The methodology aims at comparing the international macroscopic level, where ecological consciousness and policies are framed and diffused, and the local microscopic level, where they are subjected to cultural absorption and social / economic adaption. Nepal, an Asian “underdeveloped” country, has adopted and attempted to apply several international standards, National planning for development and ecological issues is failing to be fully and efficiently adopted, The structure and dynamics of national administrations are the first cause for this failure, but the perception of the effects of climate change are depending also upon cultural conceptions of nature and climate, These local conditions can _both_facilitate or hinder the acceptance of international ecological standards

While increased emphasis is placed on interactions between natural and human systems, understanding of social components of global environmental change (GEC) remains weak. Concepts of resilience, vulnerability and adaptive capacity become crucial in addressing these dimensions and need to be integrated to enhance our knowledge of consequences and responses to GEC in the context of development. In the past, approaches to GEC often solely focused on managing vulnerability while poor people were categorized as victims of environmental variability, economic exploitation and political marginalization. However, people have capabilities to cope with change and look for risk reduction strategies. A rigid vulnerability focus does not consider these capabilities and ignores levels of resilience and adaptive capacity of communities. A more positive approach is to recognize people as active agents with varying abilities to respond to change, rather than passive victims; thus highlighting resilience as it varies across communities. Resilience is increasingly central to development debates and is a crucial element in determining societies’ response capacities to change. Theoretical frameworks are applied in various contexts, while using a diverse range of definitions. This paper aims to provide an overview of the intellectual foundations of resilience and development; to contextualize resilience as a societal response option to GEC in development; and, focusing on drylands, to discuss its relevance, considering controversies over its definition, strengths and weaknesses. The discussion shows that resilience in development remains a largely elusive concept with weak practical application. There is a need for improved integration of resilience within a multidimensional paradigm that addresses local needs and future change. This is crucial in drylands, where the role of risk needs to be better understood to realize the full potential for development through strengthening human adaptive capacity. A resilience approach to development is suggested to enhance the appreciation for the interactions of societal responses to GEC within the context of development. It offers an adaptive and interdisciplinary view, while strengthening community participation and empowerment towards sustainable pathways out of poverty.

To facilitate more sustainable consumption different actors have introduced various labelling schemes providing information about a product’s environmental, social or other attributes. Based on case studies of existing labelling schemes this paper analyses how sustainability related product labels try to shape the production and consumption system by enabling political consumerism and facilitating a more sustainable modification of the supply chain. Labelling schemes are thereby understood as representing a new form of governance, which to be effective, needs the legitimisation from all actors that are essential for these processes. On the one hand this offers opportunities from empowering non-governmental actors and being dissolved from national boundaries; on the other hand it sets clear limitations for the instrument.

Many environmental issues can be attributed to misaligned distribution of the costs of conservation and the benefits of conservation. For instance, biodiversity represents value for the global community, but biodiversity protection imposes various costs on local communities in forested areas of developing countries. Correcting this misalignment requires presenting these local communities with appropriate incentives. Conservation agreements – negotiated transactions in which conservation investors finance direct social benefits in return for conservation actions by communities – are one tool for doing so. The results of this approach depend crucially on effective monitoring of both ecological and socio‐economic impacts to verify that environmental and development objectives are met in a socially equitable, economically efficient, and financially sustainable way. Monitoring also is needed to verify that parties to the agreements are in compliance with their commitments. This paper will present the conservation agreement model and demonstrate the central role of robust monitoring frameworks, using the example of agreements between Conservation International and communities in the Colombian Amazon. These agreements are designed to protect forest areas and two endangered species of fish that are important to local livelihoods and have a high commercial value in neighboring countries. A key feature of this project is that the agreements both depend on and strengthen social and resource governance within the partner communities, thereby promoting self‐determination while enhancing the overall context for socio‐economic development. At the same time, lessons generated by this project inform emerging frameworks for scaling up the approach to advance conservation and development at the national level, requiring integration with national policies. The paper will conclude by identifying the strengths and limitations of the conservation agreement approach, emphasizing that effective monitoring is essential for success and exploring the implications of scaling‐up for design of monitoring frameworks.

Sustainable water management strategies are able to cope with uncertainties in our natural and social environment. Uncertainties in our social environment reflect changing societal perceptions on how water should be used and which objectives should be preferred. Change of these perceptions may lead to a loss of public support for strategies, forcing policy makers to take measures quickly. To explore the social robustness of different water management strategies and identify circumstances in which strategies loose social support we use the perspectives method and a historical case study analysis of the Netherlands as from 1900. Resulting from our historical analysis we present ten aspects that should be included in a future exploration of social robustness. A future exploration provides insight in the risks and opportunities of strategies and on how to respond to and anticipate on events and developments in order to preserve social support.

This paper analyzes how key features of international institutions that reflect the depth of cooperation affect participation. We derive a set of arguments from the enforcement, managerial and rational design literatures and test these arguments on a new dataset that covers more than 200 global environmental treaties since 1950. We find very little support for the enforcement school’s claim of a depth versus participation dilemma: the 2 specificity of obligations has only a minor and statistically insignificant negative effect on participation rates (measured by treaty ratifications). The existence of monitoring and enforcement mechanisms has no significant effect either, and results for variables capturing other forms of delegating authority (e.g. treaty-specific secretariat, decisionmaking rules) are mixed. In contrast, we find more support for the managerial and rational design schools’ arguments: assistance provisions in treaties have a significant and substantial positive effect on participation. Similarly, most dispute settlement mechanisms promote treaty participation. While countries do not appear to stay away from treaties that mandate deeper cooperation, the inclusion of positive incentives and dispute resolution mechanisms promotes the formation of international institutions.

This paper addresses the social, economic and technological barriers and opportunities in the developing countries for designing the technology transfer and innovation regime in climate change. The author identifies the barriers and opportunities through case studies in India, Thailand and China. The author also overviews previous research on the subject and suggests social, economic and technological issues that needs to be incorporated in designing the technology transfer and innovation regime. Technology transfer and innovation is a central issue in climate change negotiations. The parties agreed to establish the “Technology mechanism” in the Copenhagen Accord and the Expert Group on Technology Transfer (EGTT) is working to produce a recommendation on the institutional design. However, no concrete proposals have been put forward yet partly due to the lack of understanding of the issue and partly due to the lack of research demonstrating the unique barriers and opportunities in the developing countries. The paper highlights several issues that the author came to recognize through case studies. One issue relates to the fact that there are different social expectations for technology transfer and innovation. Some countries are willing to invite “technology transfer” and successfully adopt technologies in operation, while some countries tend to focus on “technology innovation”. One needs to incorporate the different social expectations and needs to design multilateral projects and programs to diffuse or develop technologies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Another issue to discuss is the different concepts and levels of technology transfer. In some cases, technology transfers are not successful in the operational phase of the technologies due to the social, economic and technologies barriers. The author also emphasizes the opportunity side in the paper that there are also social, economic and technological conditions to bring leapfrogging technologies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the developing countries.

Climate protection activities at the local level play an important role towards responding effectively to global climate change. The research at hand deals with the subjectively nominated success factors and barriers relevant to the implementation of climate protection measures in local municipalities. Determinants for the transition towards energy sustainable communities (Schweizer- Ries, 2008) are the subject-matter of a longer research tradition (Schweizer-Ries, 2009). In order to work out recommendations for a German federal policy instrument designed to support municipalities towards climate protection, we chose to concentrate on municipalities having applied for the above mentioned funding. Some of these municipalities also plan to realise a process towards “zero-emission” as a long-term project. With qualitative interviews, we assessed in a first research step, how local stakeholders perceive the climate protection measures inside their municipalities, how they were successfully implemented, where social barriers appeared and how they could be minimised. Thus, we were able to collect subjective determinants of success or failure for zeroemission processes. We also examine the role of the citizens, and make the case for increased public participation. The main insights of these first results are that within the administration of local municipalities, cross-sectional interaction and communication are crucial, along with the need to engage a socially skilled permanent employee to manage the implementation of measures and activate external stakeholders. Involving citizens is pivotal in shaping a zero-emission community identity and reality. The research is designed to shed some light on the role the above mentioned financial support programme and therefore serves as policy counselling. The policy instrument seems to be able to promote most factors of success within local authorities, only minor adaptations are necessary.

Consumptive water use in the Zambezi river basin (ZRB), one of the largest freshwater catchments in Africa and worldwide, is currently around 15-20% of total runoff. This suggests many development possibilities, particularly for irrigated agriculture and hydropower production. Development plans of the riparian countries indicate that consumptive water use might increase up to 40% of total runoff already by 2025. We have constructed a rainfall–runoff model for the ZRB that is calibrated on the best available runoff data for the basin. We then feed a wide range of water demand drivers as well as climate change predictions into the model and assess their implications for runoff at key points in the water catchment. The results show that, in the absence of effective international cooperation on water allocation issues, population and economic growth, expansion of irrigated agriculture, and water transfers, combined with climatic changes are likely to have very important transboundary impacts. In particular, such impacts involve drastically reduced runoff in the dry season and changing shares of ZRB countries in runoff and water demand. These results imply that allocation rules should be set up within the next few years before serious international conflicts over sharing the Zambezi’s waters arise.

Both South Africa and China are emergent economies heavily dependent on fossilfuel based energy sources, and the potential to leverage the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) is significant in both countries. However, experience to date with CDM indicates South Africa has significantly lagged behind China in the uptake of the CDM, accounting for only 0.9% of the worldwide registered annual Certified Emission Reductions (CERs) while China has dominated the market, generating over 54% of the annual worldwide CERs. Thus, an opportunity exists to redefine the role of CDM in South Africa to better incentivise a lower carbon development trajectory. This paper provides a comparative analysis of the CDM experience in China and South Africa in order to identify the underlying drivers and obstacles to CDM in both countries. It is the authors’ objective to analyse the lessons learnt from marketleading China and laggard South Africa to better understand the structures and policies necessary within host CDM countries to unlock the potential of CDM in a post 2012 regime.

In the past forty years the architecture for global environmental governance (GEG) has been heavily debated. Numerous proposals to improve the GEG system have been developed, many of which call for the establishment of some kind of World Environment Organisation (WEO). Although there is consensus among governments and scholars that the system needs improvement, no substantial decisions on reform have been taken. This paper addresses the issue identified by the Berlin Conference concerning social barriers to effective environmental policies at the international level. Based on a literature study and more than twenty interviews, the paper identifies the main barriers for GEG reform, using three theories of new institutionalism: rational choice, discursive, and historical institutionalism. Rational choice institutionalism suggests that the fundamental differences between national and institutional self-interests is one of the barriers to GEG reform. According to discursive institutionalism, the incentive to maintain the status quo is a key hurdle, mainly caused by the fear of states and international organisations to lose part of their authority. Historical institutionalism shows that power inequalities and trust gaps between nation-states further hamper the debates. While historical institutionalism focuses on the complex nature and the ad-hoc and diffused development of the GEG system, discursive institutionalism shows that the nature of the debates concerning GEG reform thwarts progress towards agreement: debates are fragmented, tend to ‘recycle’ issues, and lack involvement of civil society and academics. The second issue identified by the Berlin Conference that the paper focuses on is the (synergies and conflicts between) theoretical approaches to questions relating to the social dimensions of environmental governance. The paper provides a critical evaluation of the utility of the theories of new institutionalism, showing that despite some fundamental differences the three theories complement rather than contradict one another in their account of the barriers to GEG reform.