The Study and Practice of Global Environmental Politics: Policy Influence through Participation

Jessica F. Green, Case Western Reserve University1 Thomas Hale, Oxford University 11 December 2014

Prepared for the TRIP Strengthening the Links Conference 14-16 January 2015 Williamsburg, VA -Please do not circulate without authors’ permission-

1. Introduction

Unlike war and peace or trade and investment, transboundary environmental problems are a relatively new feature of world politics, only emerging in the wake of the diffusion of industrial production and related global consumption patterns. But at the outset of the 21st century, it seems clear that environmental challenges will occupy a central and growing place in policymakers’ attention for the foreseeable future. Our impact on the natural world is imposing significant and increasing economic, health, and security costs on human societies. Indeed, environmental scholars now proclaim that we have entered a new epoch, the Anthropocene, in which human impact has altered the natural systems of the planet.2 Moreover, the sources of these problems span national borders, with some, like climate change, reaching literally global proportions.

The implications for world politics are profound. As an October 2014 Pentagon report noted, “Rising global temperatures, changing precipitation patterns, climbing sea levels, and more extreme weather events will intensify the challenges of global instability, hunger, poverty, and conflict. They will likely lead to food and water

1 Corresponding author. Please direct all comments to [email protected]. We would like to thank Peter Dauvergne, Kai Lee, Ron Mitchell, Marc Levy and Stacy VanDeveer for comments on an earlier draft. We are grateful to Quentin Karpilow for his excellent research assistance. 2 Crutzen and Stoermer 2000.

1 shortages, pandemic disease, disputes over refugees and resources, and destruction by natural disasters in regions across the globe.”3

The implications for the study of world politics are similarly weighty. If international relations (IR) cannot contribute to environmental questions that concern the survival of humanity, it will be of limited relevance to world politics. While the study of global environmental issues has expanded in IR, GEP remains one of the more neglected subject areas in the field, as we demonstrate empirically in Section 3. More bluntly, consider Robert O. Keohane’s the 2014 Madison Lecture at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, in which he indicted the field’s neglect of climate change:

“[A]lthough there is some outstanding work by political scientists (especially Victor 2001; Victor 2011), the list is small. Very few major political science departments have on their faculty someone whose principal research concerns climate change – although for the future of humanity climate change is at least as important as other topics that receive much more attention, including international trade and human rights. Compare our slight attention to climate change with the enormous attention the profession paid to an earlier existential threat to the planet – nuclear war.”

We concur with Keohane that environmental issues – not just climate change – remain at the margins of the discipline. If one goal of academic study is to contribute to broader public discussions of import (as we believe it is), then the subfield must engage more actively with environmental issues.

Given the relative lack of attention climate and other global environmental issues have received from IR scholars, can there be much evidence for IR’s influence on global environmental politics (GEP)? We argue that there has in fact been a substantial role for IR concepts and scholars in the practice and policy of global politics of the environment.

We find it analytically useful to divide “influence” into three ideal types that fall on a “direct-indirect” spectrum. At the most direct level, causal influence occurs when scholarly ideas alter the behavior of policymakers through observable causal mechanisms. In other words, policy behavior would not have occurred but for specific academic findings or concepts. At the other end of the spectrum, diffuse influence occurs when scholarly research generally tracks and responds to the concerns raised in the policy world, and vice-versa. Here scholars and policymakers do not necessarily interact extensively, but share a common set of interests, knowledge, concerns, and assumptions.

Between these two extremes, we identify interactive influence, in which scholars actively participate alongside policymakers in various policy processes. In this form

3 U.S. Department of Defense. 2014 Climate Change Adaptation Report. Washington, DC. Available at: http://www.acq.osd.mil/ie/download/CCARprint.pdf.

2 of influence, in the middle of the spectrum, causality likely flows both ways, as scholars and policymakers engage in information exchange within a context of joint problem-solving. We argue that this last form of influence is the most significant within GEP, and relatively more common in GEP than in other IR subfields for three reasons: the technical nature of many issues increases the relative value of specialized knowledge, and epistemic communities include social scientists; GEP scholars are personally committed to environmental policy; and environmental policymakers are more diffuse and accessible than those in other issue areas.

The paper proceeds as follows. We first describe how we define the various types of influence in greater detail. The remainder of the paper considers how each type of influence has and has not manifested in the realm of global environmental politics (GEP). We begin with diffuse influence, considering the parallel development of global environmental politics and the study thereof. We find increasing resonance between the two over time, as well as a growing role for GEP in IR. Next, we consider an example of direct influence. This is quite rare. Last, we consider interactive influence, which we argue to be of particular relevance for global environmental politics. The conclusion identifies opportunities for IR scholars to expand policy-relevant research on environmental politics going forward.

2. Defining Influence: Causal, Diffuse, and Engagement

In order to determine whether GEP scholarship has had any influence on policy practice, we must define what we mean by influence. We suggest that influence can be conceptualized on a continuum. At the most direct end, specific scholarly ideas and actions alter the behavior of policymakers. Betsill and Correll define this type of influence as situations “when one actor intentionally communicates to another so as to alter the latter’s behavior from what would have occurred otherwise.”4 This is a very high standard for influence; indeed, Betsill and Correll apply this definition to NGOs, who generally have the explicit project of influencing state policy. To establish this type of specific influence requires careful analysis, which would likely include process tracing and counterfactual analysis to demonstrate that the proposal advanced by a specific actor is reflected in the outcomes because of that actor’s efforts.

As we explore below, we expect this type of attributable, causal influence to be rare because it requires academics to divert significant time from research and teaching, and presumes that academics and their ideas wield decisive influence in complex policy processes in which many different actors compete for influence. These conditions obtain infrequently. Nonetheless, we find it is useful to consider causal influence as an ideal type because it corresponds to an intuitive (or possibly naïve) view of what “influence” entails.

4 Betsill and Corell 2008, 24.

3 At the other end of the continuum is a much more diffuse form of influence, where concepts and ideas generated by GEP scholars are adopted by policy practitioners and reflected in policy outcomes. This need not be the result of scholars’ efforts, but instead can occur because academic work simply “out there” in the world is utilized in the crafting or implementation of policy. For example, scholars who name phenomena and describe their characteristics may render a useful service to policymakers or activists who then can build on this knowledge, although they do not seek to influence individual actors or policies. Scholars react to developments in the policy world, and scholarly concepts and ideas leak into policy discussions and, ultimately, policy. We posit that this highly diffuse form of (mutual) influence is the most common variety, on average, across issue areas and subfields.

In between these two ends of the continuum are forms of influence we broadly term interactive influence, which we define as the direct involvement of scholars in policy work. Such involvement can take several forms. First, many multilateral environmental institutions allow and encourage academic observers (along with other members of civil society) to participate through official submissions, “side events” at multilateral meetings, and in other ways. GEP scholars regularly put forward a range of ideas and policy proposals, many (but not all) drawing on academic data and analysis. Second, many international organizations include scholarly experts in various committees tasked with reviewing or implementing decisions. For example, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), tasked with developing a scientific consensus on the causes and impacts of climate change and the various policy responses available, self-consciously incorporates a range of social scientists, including IR scholars.

Table 1 summarizes each type of influence. We do not think more direct forms of influence are innately “better” than more diffuse forms. Nor do we wish to imply that a subfield with many examples of direct influence is necessarily more “relevant” than one with few examples. More likely, a healthy scholarship-policy relationship requires a diverse set of interactions that includes all forms of influence. We raise this as a conjecture in need of further reflection and discussion.

4 Type of influence Relationship between scholar and policymaker Causal Scholars or academically-derived ideas persuade policymakers Interactive Policymaker consults with scholars, or scholar-practitioners serve as a bridge Diffuse General resonance between academic literature and ideas in the policy world, each is aware of the other but not directly linked. Table 1. Types of policy influence

3. Diffuse influence: GEP Scholarship Tracks Political Discussions

Has IR scholarship tracked GEP following a pattern of diffuse influence? We attempt to answer that question in this section by describing the co-evolution of GEP and the study thereof. A key challenge for this exercise is delineating the field of global environmental politics and the role of IR scholarship within it. GEP is a large and diverse field, comprising many different disciplines. Surprisingly few histories of the field have been written. Even among accounts within IR, the contours of the discipline have been drawn quite differently.5

We find it useful to take an historical approach. We discuss the main themes of scholarly inquiry roughly by decade, paying particular attention to when and how political scientists contribute to and shape these discussions. Some of the discussion reflects our recognition that discussions do not divide neatly by year, and thus, there is some overlap across them. Furthermore, since the goal of the chapter is to evaluate the influence of IR scholars on policymaking, we also track the extent to which scholarly discussions overlap with policy debates in the same time period.

Two core findings emerge. First, while political scientists were relatively unengaged in GEP in early years, there has been increasing overlap between IR research on the environment and the important political developments of the time. Second, there has also been a secular increase in the importance of environmental issues in policy. In other words, as GEP has grown more important to world politics, IR has grown more interested in GEP. However, as we note in section 4, GEP is still underrepresented in mainstream IR.

5 See, e.g. Zurn 1998; Mitchell 2002; Dauvergne 2005; Busby 2010; Paterson 2014; Stevis 2014.

5 3.1 Early origins: functional regimes, transnational governance, and epistemic communities, but few political scientists

While GEP is conventionally seen to start in the postwar period, its precursors emerged as early as the late 19th century. These early origins are worth noting for two reasons. First, they show that even a century ago, some of the core features of contemporary GEP—functional regimes and institutions that emphasize the role of non-state actors and epistemic communities—were already features of the policy landscape.6 Second, they demonstrate that the political scientists of the day were largely uninterested in these phenomena.

A number of treaties designed to conserve transboundary species emerged in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Bird-watching groups and ornithologists in Europe convinced governments to adopt the Convention for the Protection of Birds Useful to Agriculture in 1902, and the US and the UK (on behalf of Canada) adopted a migratory bird treaty in 1916, which was extended to Mexico in 1936. In 1911, governments involved in the Bering Sea fur trade created the 1911 Fur Seals Treaty to collectively manage seal populations.7 And in 1936, a number of whaling countries signed an International Agreement for the Regulation of Whaling, which was upgraded to the stricter International Convention for the Regulation of Whaling in 1947.

There was also interest in creating a general international environmental organization at this time. The first call for such an entity came from a meeting of environmentalists at the 1909 International Congress for the Protection of Nature. These efforts resulted in a Swiss-led project to create a new intergovernmental organization, the Consultative Commission for the International Protection of Nature, though its mandate was limited to information-gathering and exchange. This new organization never had a chance to meet, however, because of the outbreak of WWI. Environmentalists tried to recreate it as part of the League of Nations in the 1920s, but could not convince League member states to agree. Instead, conservation groups and scientists took it on themselves to create an information-sharing organization, founding the International Office for the Protection of Nature in 1934. This hybrid entity was staffed by a mix of governmental and private actors, composed chiefly of natural scientists and conservationists.8 A second attempt to create an international environmental organization in the 1940s also failed to create a strong intergovernmental body, and instead resulted in a similar hybrid arrangement initially called the International Union for the Protection of Nature, and then the International Union for the Conservation of Nature after 1956.

6 For a discussion, see Hale, Held and Young 2013, Chapter Four. See also Boardman 1981. 7 Barrett 2003, Chapter 2. 8 Boardman 1981; Hale, Held, and Young 2013.

6 There is thus a significant amount of international environmental policymaking in the first half of the 20th century. But there is a striking absence of social scientific interest. For example, we find no mention of the treaties or organizations listed above in the American Political Science Review before 1950. Instead, natural scientists were the key experts influencing policy, as they remain to this day. As in later environmental treaties, epistemic groups of scientific experts played a key role in putting conservation on the political agenda and designing and even helping to operate the resulting institutions. The International Ornithological Congress, for example, played a key role in designing the bird treaties and defining which species would be protected.9 Similarly, scientific conservationist groups were the key actors pushing to create a general international environmental institution. When they failed to convince governments, these same groups ended up forming their own institutions to perform a similar task, creating hybrid public-private arrangements.

3.2 1960s: The growth dilemma

We now jump ahead to the beginnings of GEP in the post-world order. During the 1960s environmental issues were growing beyond their initial “conservation” focus aimed at species protection and transboundary resource management. Instead, issues of economic growth and human welfare became more central, bringing an important inflection point in both policy interest and scholarly work on topics within the realm of GEP. Most of this work focused on the related issues of population growth and resource scarcity. Population growth was a timely topic, since global rates of growth increased precipitously in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Between 1955 and 1970, global population growth rates hovered between 1.8 and 2.0%.10 Now, it is estimated to be closer to 1%.11

As population grew, scarcity became an issue: would there be enough resources to accommodate the ever-growing number of human beings on the planet? This question was particularly important in the developing world, where rates of growth were higher, and scarcity was already an issue.

Paul and Anne Ehrlich’s work, The Population Bomb, was pessimistic about global prospects. Published in 1968, the book echoed the arguments elaborated by Malthus in An Essay on the Principle of Population, in which Malthus predicted that the linear increase in food supply would eventually be overtaken by the exponential growth in population.12 This simple mathematical identity made indefinite human expansion impossible. Eventually, reproduction would be limited by the availability of other resources. The Ehrlichs re-introduced the idea of Malthusian limits,

9 On delegation to non-state actors in multilateral environmental agreements, see Green 2008; Green 2014, chap. 2. 10 http://esa.un.org/wpp/excel-data/population.htm. 11http://www.un.org/esa/population/publications/longrange2/WorldPop2300fina l.pdf, p. 14. 12 Malthus 2013 (1798).

7 predicting that famines would soon become common as the “population bomb” exploded.

A similar message was delivered by the so-called “Club of Rome” – a group of academics working at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology – through the book entitled The Limits to Growth. This work, spearheaded by natural scientists Donella and Dennis Meadows, Jorgen Randers and William W. Behrens III, used computer models to predict how the interactions between different problems and factors would affect “the present and future predicament of man.”13 Their models investigate the effects of five trends—industrialization, population growth, malnutrition, depletion of nonrenewable resources and deteriorating environmental quality. Their findings are similarly pessimistic: they predict that the limits to growth will be reached within the next century.

Other works examine how human behaviors beyond reproduction may exacerbate problems of scarcity. Garrett Hardin’s classic work “The Tragedy of the Commons” describes how the rational behavior of individuals leads to a collectively irrational outcome – the destruction of commonly-held resources. Without any external restraint or regulation, “freedom in a commons brings ruin to all.”14 This model would later be appropriated by rational choice approaches to international cooperation.

Finally, in a debate that ranged over several publications, Paul Ehrlich, John Holdren and Barry Commoner collectively developed the “IPAT” identity, which identified three key interacting factors that determine environmental impact: population, affluence and technology.15 They argued that population growth alone could not provide a full understanding of environmental impact. Rather, the use of technology, and the level of affluence could potentially have mitigating or exacerbating effects. As such, simply controlling population growth would not adequately address the problem of scarcity.

In sum, scholarly work in the 1960s focuses on population growth and scarcity. At this time, the developing world is growing rapidly, and thus is largely responsible for overall global increases. In effect, these debates are about the spillover effects of the behavior of developing countries.

Again, it is important to note that political scientists largely absent from the discussion. The vast majority contributors to the overpopulation and scarcity debates were natural scientists. In general, in its earliest days, GEP is seen as the realm of natural, not social, science.

13Meadows, Rome, and Associates 1974, ix. 14 Hardin 1968. 15 Commoner 1972; Ehrlich and Holdren 1972.

8 3.3 The 1970s: The Emergence of the Modern Environmental Movement and Global Environmental Governance

Environmental issues experienced a step change in political salience in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Reacting to a series of industrial disasters and warnings like Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, the modern environmental movement emerged around the industrialized world demanding government intervention to protect air, water, and other natural resources. This grassroots movement resulted in the creation of modern environmental laws and regulatory institutions in advanced economies.

This same shift also marked a turning point for environmental politics at the international level. In 1971, scientific experts from the developing world released the Founex Report (named after the location of the meeting, Founex, Switzerland). The report made three important contributions to the broader political dialogue. First, it recognized that developing countries also experienced “environmental” problems, though these were of a very different sort than those in the developed world. Second, it laid the foundations for further discussion on the relationship between economic development and environmental protection at the upcoming UN Conference on the Human Environment, to be held in Stockholm in 1972. Emphasizing the needs of developing countries was likely an important factor in catalyzing their participation at the conference. Third and finally, it drastically shifted the tenor of debates about GEP. Developing countries were no longer the object of analysis (and the source of the problem), they were also viewed as necessary participants in an ongoing discussion about solutions.

At first, these tectonic political shifts went largely unnoticed by IR scholars.16 But one very important exception came from a figure at the very center of the discipline’s scholarship-policy nexus: George Kennan. Writing in Foreign Affairs in 1970, Kennan called for the creation of an International Environment Organization to coordinate global efforts to protect the planet. Such an institution could facilitate research and information-sharing and coordinate national regulatory strategies, he argued. More radically, he also suggested it could directly regulate the global commons over which no nation exercised sovereignty. Though not explicit or developed, the functionalist institutionalist logic that underpinned Kennan’s argument would have been immediately recognizable to the regime theorists in subsequent decades.

Kennan’s proposal had a real-world test just a few years later. In 1972, states held the first global conference on environmental issues, a kind of environmental “Bretton Woods.” The Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment grew out of the problems identified in the Founex Report. 113 nations, along with representatives of international organizations and NGOs convened to decide how to address these issues. There were several key outcomes. First, the Stockholm

16 Exceptions include Falk 1971; Sprout 1971; Caldwell 1972.

9 Declaration established basic principles to guide future action. Importantly, this included recognition of states’ sovereign right to exploit resources within their borders (Principle 21), as well as humans “solemn responsibility to protect and improve the environment for present and future generations” (Principle 1). These two principles, among others, would become important aspects of soft law in future environmental rulemaking. Second, the Conference outlined a “Plan of Action” identifying a series of steps that states should take to establish a comprehensive agenda and work program on environmental issues. Third, and finally, states created the UN Environment Programme, an international institution charged with “promot[ing] international co-operation in the field of environment.”17

From the perspective of IR scholarship, the UNCHE conference was significant in that it created the international institutions and institutional framework that would become the focus of academic research in the 1980s and 1990s—a point to which we will promptly return.

The Stockholm Declaration recognized the important role of economic growth for developing nations. Principle Four notes that “in the developing countries most of the environmental problems are caused by under-development.” While a few scholars, notably those from the developing world,18 took this as an important cue for refocusing GEP scholarship, most continued to explore questions of population and scarcity. However, the cleavage between developed and developing countries on the relative prioritization of growth and conservation, already visible in Stockholm, would become the enduring fault line of GEP in the decades that followed.19

Research on “bioenvironmentalism”, which “stresses the biological limits of the Earth to support life,” also flourished in the 1970s.20 These works, like their predecessors were preoccupied with questions of scarcity and the ability of the planet to provide sufficient resources to humanity. IR theorists entered into this debate, notably through a 1977 special issue of International Studies Quarterly, entitled “The International Politics of Scarcity.” The volume begins from the simple but bold premise that “it has become apparent to even the most skeptical that an international politics of scarcity, real or contrived, will be an important characteristic of the future international system.”21 These works foreshadow ongoing research agendas in GEP: the effects of a rise in oil prices,22 the exploitation of ocean resources,23 and the role of domestic politics. Some ideas put forth in that

17 A/RES/27/2997 18 Castro 1972. 19 Najam 2005. 20 Clapp and Dauvergne 2011, 9. 21 Pirages 1977, 564. 22 Bobrow, Kudrle, and Pirages 1977. 23 Barkenbus 1977.

10 volume, such as the exploration of space, and the return to semi-autarky, did not withstand the test of time.24

Thus, the 1970s marks the beginning of a corpus of work by IR scholars on GEP issues. Interestingly, however, these do not map onto policy discussions of the era. Rather, they respond to earlier academic work, by GEP scholars outside of IR, focused on questions of capacity and resource provision in the face of growing population.

3.4 1980-1990s: Enter Regime Theory

As international regimes grew in the environmental arena, so did both the study and policy surrounding GEP. A number of important agreements were signed, including: the Mediterranean Action Plan, the Convention on Long Range Transboundary Air Pollution, the Montreal Protocol, as well as a several treaties governing various fish species and the protection of the Antarctic.25 The heyday of international environmental lawmaking was underway, coinciding with the rise of regime theory in IR.

At the same time, the institutional architecture of GEP continued to expand. The UN General Assembly affirmed the need for a greater role for UNEP in establishing programmatic priorities for environmental protection in the developing world.26 As a result of the increasing focus on GEP, then UN Secretary General Javier Perez de Cuellar created the World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED), chaired by the Prime Minister of Norway, Gro Harlem Brundtland. The so-called Brundtland Commission issued its final report, Our Common Future, in 1987. The report issued the seminal, paradigmatic statement on sustainable development, which it defined as “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”27

Beyond a simple, though politically powerful definition of sustainable development, the Brundtland Commission elaborated a vision of neoliberal environmentalism.28 It explicitly rejects the notion of planetary limits, instead insisting that social and

24 Salmon 1977; Soroos 1977. It is also interesting to note that while some of the contributors had distinguished academic careers, none were part of mainstream IR discussions. 25 For a useful breakdown of multilateral environmental treaties by decade, see Mitchell 2002-14. 26 A/RES/UNGA/38/165. 27 World Commission on Environment and Development 1987, p. 9. 28 This borrows from Bernstein 2000, who describes “liberal environmentalism” which “which predicate[s] environmental protection on the promotion and maintenance of a liberal economic order.” Our slight modification makes explicit the connections to the activities and ideologies of other international institutions at the time.

11 technological “limitations” impede our ability to alleviate poverty.29 And since sustainable development requires meeting the needs of present generations, addressing poverty is critical. Although the notion of sustainable development has subsequently be reinterpreted in a variety of ways, its original meaning emphasized growth for the poor, and consumptive restraint by the rich.30

The Brundtland Commission had one other lasting effect. It insisted upon the need for international cooperation to achieve the twin goals of economic growth and environmental protection, including the need for more international and domestic environmental law and the active participation of multilateral financial institutions to provide necessary funding and know-how to developing nations. This was, of course, easier said than done, and subsequent decades would show how the “sustainable development” concept could paper over the competing priorities of rich and poor countries. Regardless, however, Our Common Future provided an additional political mandate for an expanded international institutional architecture.

This mandate was acted on at the 1992 Rio Earth Summit, a kind of “Bretton Woods” for GEP in which 172 countries (116 represented by their heads of state) agreed to an extraordinarily ambitious series of commitments to protect the global environment, including a wide-ranging aspirational text called Agenda 21, which sought to commit countries to the goals identified in the Bruntland Report. More tangibly, new regimes emerged in issue areas like forests, biodiversity, and climate change. Two decades later, most of the goals of this new wave of treaty-making remain unresolved, but the possibility of effective global regulation of the environment seemed very real at the time, and was attracting the attention of IR scholars.

In the mid-1980s, regime theory came to the fore among IR scholars. The 1982 special issue of International Organization on international regimes opened a new research agenda for IR scholars, and for IR scholars of GEP in particular. Krasner’s oft-cited definition of regimes as “principles, norms, rules, and decision-making procedures around which actor expectations converge in a given issue-area”, aptly described the flurry of activity evolving in the international environmental arena.31 New international legal instruments, expanding mandates for existing international organizations, and increasing activity of non-state actors were all indications of the growth of environmental regimes.

The growth in both prominence and breadth of GEP in world politics was soon followed by a similar growth in scholarly attention. Game theoretic approaches to cooperation included examinations of environmental problems.32 Regime theory

29 WCED 1987, p. 9. 30 Ibid. 31 Salmon 1977; Soroos 1977. 32 Barrett 1994; Oye and Maxwell 1994.

12 conveniently provided a theoretical lens for analysis, which many GEP scholars adopted. Many historical accounts concur that work on environmental regimes is paradigmatic of GEP contributions to the broader field of IR.

The work on environmental regimes can be roughly divided as addressing four themes: creation, formation, compliance and effectiveness. Early work by Oran Young presents a model of institutional bargaining that emphasizes characteristics beyond domestic politics to explain regime formation, such as the availability of solutions, perceptions of equity and robust compliance mechanisms.33 Peter Haas’s work on epistemic communities—which has made an impact in IR well beyond the subfield of GEP—emphasizes consensus among scientific experts in promoting regime formation.34 The role of specific leaders has also been cited by a number of scholars as a key element in explaining the successful formation of some regimes.35 Others have sought to explain formation by examining the question of why some environmental problems do not result in regime creation.36

Regime design is also viewed as a function of the type of environmental problem. GEP scholars have created numerous typologies for characterizing environmental problems.37 Consistent with neoliberal institutionalism, a number of explanations of regime design hinge on the nature of the problem. Mitchell’s study of MARPOL shows how technology standards were able to dramatically reduce marine pollution, whereas the cheaper option – discharge limits in the vicinity of the shore – was not.38 The former approach was more easily monitored and enforced, since boats without the requisite technology were denied port entry. Victor and Coben offer a cogent critique of the Kyoto Protocol, based on a mismatch of problem to solution. Solutions have been focused on “deploying a ‘quantity’ instrument against a problem best suited for ‘prices.’”39 More recent work by Young has described these design issues as a question of “institutional fit.”40 Others view the question of fit through an ecology lens, examining whether institutional solutions respond to the ecological scale of the problem.41

Within the regime literature, GEP scholars have perhaps been most focused on questions of whether environmental regimes are effective. Effectiveness is defined differently by different scholars. The two primary distinctions are between adoption of and adherence to rules and measurable improvements in environmental

33 Victor 2011; Hale, Held, and Young 2013. 34 Haas 1989. Dimitrov 2003 also emphasizes the importance of scientific knowledge. 35 Mitchell 2003. 36 Dimitrov 2002; Davenport 2005. 37 See, e.g. Mitchell 2010; O’Neill 2009. 38 Mitchell 1994. 39 Victor and Coben 2005, p. 25. 40 Young 2002. 41 Galaz et al. 2008; Gupta 2008; Andonova and Mitchell 2010.

13 outcomes.42 The latter is particularly challenging, since it requires comparison to a counterfactual (the environmental outcomes in the absence of the treaty), and acknowledgement that other factors beyond the regime may contribute to environmental degradation.43 Finally, since treaty compliance may be an endogenous behavior, it is difficult to show that regimes truly “constrain” behavior, rather than simply screen the participating actors.44 Mitchell’s meta-analysis demonstrates the difficulties of evaluating effectiveness. Several of his examples show conflicting conclusions about the same regime, or dramatic changes in the assessment over time.45

For these reasons, sweeping conclusions about the effectiveness of environmental regimes is challenging. A few works have put forth useful frameworks that suggest some useful starting points. Haas, Keohane and Levy found regimes to be most effective when the “3Cs” were in effect: environmental concern, a hospitable contractual environment and adequate levels of national capacity.46 Brown Weiss and Jacobson note that country-level factors, the international context, regime design, and the character of the activity that the agreement is regulating.47 The majority of work tends to be qualitative and comparative, seeking to draw generalizable conclusions from successes and failures.

Other work evaluates effectiveness quantitatively. Breitmeier et. al. compiled database of international environmental regimes, and which aims to provide a broader picture of effectiveness across issue areas.48 Mitchell’s International Environmental Agreements Database provides a tremendous resource for GEP scholars studying various regime characteristics.49

This brief review of work on international environmental regimes only scratches the surface of a vast body of literature. This is perhaps the emblematic contribution of GEP scholars to IR discussions. Although it coincided with a dramatic growth in environmental regimes, the links to policy discussions are tenuous at best. The period is characterized more by parallel trajectories between policy and scholarship than meaningful interaction.

42 On this distinction see Haas, Keohane, and Levy 1993; Jacobson and Weiss 1995; Miles et al. 2001. 43 Mitchell 2003, 444. 44 von Stein 2005. 45 Mitchell 2003, 447. 46 Haas, Keohane, and Levy 1993. 47 Jacobson and Weiss 1995. 48 Breitmeier, Young, and Zurn 2006. 49 Mitchell 2002-14. His work has provided the empirical basis for work by a number of other young scholars. See e.g. Green 2014; Kim 2013 and more generally http://iea.uoregon.edu/page.php?query=static&file=publications.htm.

14 3.5 2000s to the present: The Limits of Regimes and Regime Theory

The sense of possibility that characterized GEP in the early 1990s did not endure. Countries have met countless times to negotiate measures to strengthen and implement the regimes they created in and around the Rio summit, but few successes emerged in the following decades. The number of new treaties began to decline (see Figure 1), as countries proved unable to find agreements that accommodated the divergent needs of developed and developing countries, especially as environmental issue penetrated deeper into the core economic interests of states. Some academic observers began to speak of “gridlock” in environmental governance.50 While regime theory blossomed—IR scholars were developing ever more sophisticated analyses of regime design and effectiveness— environmental regimes themselves were stagnating. Arguably, political scientists were too focused on the functionalist logics guiding institutional design, and less engaged in thinking through the political conditions under which such ideas could be realized.

40

35

30

25

20

15

10

5

0 1873 1883 1893 1903 1913 1923 1933 1943 1953 1963 1973 1983 1993 2003 1868 1878 1888 1898 1908 1918 1928 1938 1948 1958 1968 1978 1988 1998 2008 Figure 1. Environmental treaties created per year, 1868–2012 (N=670) Source: UNEP 2012.

At the same time, both policymakers’ and scholars’ attention increasingly focused on other forms of global governance. The 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development touted the importance of public-private partnerships in harnessing financing and expertise for promoting “green growth.” NGOs, private firms and

50 Victor 2011; Hale, Held, and Young 2013.

15 states increasingly began to collaborate on joint initiatives to manage environmental problems. For instance, the Small Grants Program of the Global Environment Facility provides project financing to NGOs and community organizations to promote sustainable development, with a co-decision making role for national governments.51 The Global Reporting Initiative is another example; designed by an international NGO in consultation with a broad network of stakeholders, it provides a framework for organizations to evaluate and report on their sustainability. This period has also been marked by a precipitous growth in entrepreneurial private authority, situations in which non-state actors serve as de facto regulators, creating rules on everything from tropical commodities to carbon.52

This shift, seen in other issue areas as well (especially health, human rights, and various aspects of financial and commercial regulation) has now led to a formidable literature by IR scholars on private entrepreneurial authority and other forms of transnational governance. These works examine how NGOs, firms, and other sub/non-state actors and networks comprised of both create voluntary standards to regulate environmental externalities.53 A large swath of this work has focused on forestry, and in particular, the Forestry Stewardship Council.54 There is another burgeoning body of work that focuses on entrepreneurial authority and climate change.55 Still other scholars have examined private standards on the sustainable production of commodities such as coffee, tea, fisheries, palm oil, and organics, among others.56

GEP scholarship has responded to the rise of non-state actors and the growth in institutional complexity. Although much of this work remains on the margin of broader IR scholarship, it responds directly to how environmental politics “is done” at the global level. A growing body of work examines public private partnerships, and the ways in which international organizations can help “orchestrate” activity among NGOs and other non-state actors.57 Other scholars have studied the proliferation of non-state actors at various levels of governance working transnationally to address environmental problems.58

51 Andonova 2010. 52 Green 2014. 53 For an excellent review of this literature, see Vogel 2008. 54 Cashore 2002; Bartley 2003; Cashore, Auld, and Newsom 2004; Meidinger 2006. 55 Bernstein et al. 2010; Newell and Paterson 2010; Hoffman 2011; Meckling 2011; Bulkeley et al. 2012; Green 2013; Green 2014. 56 Dingwerth and Pattberg 2009; Fransen 2011; Auld 2014. 57 On partnerships see, Hale and Mauzerall 2004; Andonova and Levy 2004; Andonova 2011. On orchestration see Abbott and Snidal 2010; Abbott et al. 2014; Hale and Roger 2014. 58 Keck and Sikkink 1998; Betsill and Bulkeley 2006; Hadden 2015.

16 Another hallmark of the last decade of global environment politics is the growing density of the international arena, in which laws and regimes increasingly “bump into” each other. This overlap is most clear in the relationship between trade and a variety of environmental issues. Questions whether free trade can be curtailed in the name of environmental preferences have surfaced in a number of issues over the last two decades.59 Most recently, the EU sought to require flights traveling through European airspace to purchase emissions allowances. This extraterritorial application of EU law almost sparked a trade war, with opposing countries claiming that requiring the purchase of allowances could constitute a restriction in trade. Writing about the plant biodiversity regime, and Raustiala and Victor coined the term “regime complex” to describe the increasingly overlapping nature of international rules and institutions, a concept that has been applied beyond the environmental realm.60

Environmental issues have also increasingly overlapped with security concerns.61 IR scholars were amongst the first to recognize the threat that climate change posed to national security62 and forcefully made the case to the defense establishment.63 The Pentagon’s response has been significant (as the report quoted in the introduction demonstrates). It may be the case that the traditional authority of IR scholars on security matters gave the field additional credibility vis-à-vis policymakers considering this aspect of GEP.

4. Contributions of Global Environmental Politics to IR

In sum, the academic study of GEP, including its IR components, has increasingly tracked the policy realm. But this growing relevance has not necessarily increased the standing of environmental politics within IR. In this section we review the TRIP data to understand the place of GEP scholars and scholarship in IR.

First, how many IR scholars work on the environment? Using the TRIP faculty survey data, we classified GEP scholars as any respondent who listed “international environment” or “environment” as either their primary or secondary research area.64 Because the TRIP survey includes response from the same scholars over multiple years, but not every scholar is recorded in every year, we look only at the most recent year a scholar answered the question. This process yielded 5,049 scholars with identifiable research areas, of whom 352 (7 percent) were classified

59 For a succinct overview, see O’Neill 2009, chap. 5. 60 Raustiala and Victor 2004. 61 See e.g. Homer-Dixon 1991. 62 Hendrix and Glaser 2007; Busby 2008. 63 Busby 2007. 64 Note that “The Environment” was not listed as a secondary research area.

17 as GEP scholars.65 These individuals were comparable to non-GEP scholars in terms of gender and age distribution. GEP scholars are therefore a small but non-trivial section of the discipline.

The TRIP article database provides important insights into the role of the environmental subfield in the discipline. A significant volume of environmental IR scholarship is published in specialized journals like Global Environmental Politics. But this work is not well represented in the top discipline-wide journals. The TRIP Journal Article database includes 5,306 articles in the top 12 IR (and IR-related) journals from 1980 to 2012. The database codes both the “issue area” an article falls under (i.e., which subfield of IR), and the substantive focus of the article.

Environmental politics is amongst the least represented topics in the top IR journals by both measures. Just 65 articles (1.23 percent) fell into the environment issue area, and only 124 (2.34 percent) had a substantive focus on environmental issues. Given that GEP scholars represent 7 percent of the discipline, it seems reasonable to infer that GEP scholars are underrepresented in top journals, though the comparison is inexact.

This neglect does not seem, prima facie, attributable to paradigmatic or methodological differences between IR and environmental scholarship. Articles with a substantive focus on environment used quantitative methods and formal modeling at the same rate as the broader field. And, interestingly, articles with a substantive focus on environment were not any more or less likely to offer policy prescriptions than the field as a whole.

Interestingly, articles focused on the environment had a statistically different distribution in the use of IR paradigms than the rest of the field. Most notably, environmental articles were less likely to employ realist paradigms, and more likely to employ liberal ones than the rest of the field.

65 Including repeat observations yields a sample of 7,154 person-years, 503 of which correspond to GEP scholar-years.

18 21

10 8 7 6 5 5 4 4 4 4 4 4 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 1 1 1 0 0 0 1980 1981 1982 1983 1984 1985 1987 1989 1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1997 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2007 2009 2010 2011 2012 1986 1988 1996 1998 2006 2008 Figure 2: Articles with a substantive focus on the environment published in top 12 IR journals, 1980-2012 (N=124) Source: TRIP journal data

However, the low rate of publication and citation in top journals does not mean that the study of environmental politics has had no influence on IR. Some key concepts generated in the study of the environment have found broader resonance in the discipline, as noted above. Environmental politics has proven a ready ground for the test of regime theory and questions of institutional design. The importance of scientific networks in the realm has made IR scholars aware of the importance of epistemic communities. The increasing proliferation of transnational actors and transnational governance in environmental politics have done much to bring those questions to the attention of IR scholars. And the resulting complexity has provided a powerful conceptual tool for application to many realms of world politics.

5. Causal influence: A Rarity in GEP

Thus far, we have demonstrated that diffuse influence occurs frequently in GEP; there is ample evidence of GEP scholarship tracking trends in the political arena. We now turn to the two other forms of influence – causal and interactive. We find few instances of causal influence, but argue that this reflects structural constraints and professional incentives as much as the ability of scholars to effect influence in the policy process.

19 Much of the discussion regarding the policy relevance of scholarly work explicitly or implicitly posits an attributable, causal relationship between a scholar and his or her work and a policy outcome, what we have termed “causal influence.” For example, in the UK’s Research Excellence Framework (the evaluative process through which government funding is awarded to universities) impact counts for 20 percent of an institution’s score, and is defined as “an effect on, change or benefit to the economy, society, culture, public policy or services, health, the environment or quality of life, beyond academia.”66 In the United States, Congress has sought to limit National Science Foundation support for political science to research that directly contributes to national security and economic growth.67

Academics may sometimes achieve this form of influence, but we argue that such cases are likely to be few, for several reasons. First, direct influence is typically time- intensive, creating large opportunity costs for academics who could earn greater professional rewards from research published in top journals. This incentive structure particularly discourages younger scholars who are typically seeking to establish reputations in the field and secure tenured or tenure-track jobs.

Second, academics are not NGOs, lobbyists, or think tank researchers. Not only do they have less time to devise and advocate policy proposals, they have less experience in doing so and fewer personal connections to policymakers (qualities highly valued by policy insiders seeking influence). Moreover, we can expect, on average, that academics will have less aptitude for policy work than individuals who have selected into more policy-focused lines of work (there are of course exceptions).

The final point is a consequence of the previous two. Academics are on average relatively less effective at direct policy work than other actors, so their causal impact will tend to be overshadowed by others’. Policymaking typically involves a struggle between different actors seeking to influence outcomes. For important policies, such competition is fierce, even amongst actors that share policy goals but compete for prestige or funding from donors. In such an environment, it is unlikely that policy work by academics will be the decisive factor influencing an outcome. In other words, even if academics do devote time and energy to policy work, there are systematic reasons to expect instances of causal influence to be few.

Defined in this narrow (but intuitive and influential) fashion, causal influence has rarely occurred in global environmental politics. Indeed, we suggest that it is almost a null set, for the reasons explained above. We offer one causal influence—John Ruggie’s efforts to create the United Nations Global Compact, a set of voluntary

66http://www.ref.ac.uk/media/ref/content/pub/assessmentframeworkandguidanc eonsubmissions/GOS%20including%20addendum.pdf 67 http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/senate-delivers-a-devastating- blow-to-the-integrity-of-the-scientific-process-at-the-national-science-foundation- 199221111.html

20 standards for multinational corporations—and an unsuccessful one, recent proposals by IR scholars to establish a World Environment Organization.

John Ruggie and the Global Compact

For many years, the United Nations has sought to regulate the activities of multinational corporations. In the 1970s, these efforts were driven by developing countries seeking to advance a “New International Economic Order,”68 but this proposal foundered after the oil crisis of the early 1970s passed. In the 1990s, new efforts grew to regulate the impact of MNCs on human rights and the natural environment, driven chiefly by Northern civil society groups. Many of these efforts took the form of voluntary regulatory standards, which sometimes included transparency provisions or other non-juridical enforcement provisions.69

One of the most central (and most studied) voluntary standards was devised, advocated for, and led by an IR scholar, Harvard professor John Ruggie. Ruggie has contributed to the literature on epistemic communities and international regimes, and is perhaps best known for explaining how “embedded liberalism”—the way in which economic integration was enabled by the redistributive functions of the welfare state—underpinned the postwar global economic order.70 In 1997, he became UN Assistant Secretary-General for Strategic Planning, a post created for him by then Secretary-General Kofi Annan.

In this role, Ruggie devised and oversaw the implementation of the United Nations Global Compact, a set of ten principles, derived from labor, human rights, and environmental treaties,71 that 12,000 corporations have elected to adopt as of 2014. Signatory companies are not subject to “hard” enforcement provisions, but rather must provide periodic updates on their progress toward the realization of the principles, and can benefit from dissemination of best practices. The Global Compact stands out from many other voluntary regulatory schemes in that it carries the official imprimatur of the United Nations. In Ruggie’s view, the Global Compact is an attempt to operationalize, in a globalized world, the “embedded liberalism” compromise between social values and market exigencies he identified in his previous scholarship.72

What explains the success of Ruggie’s efforts at what we have termed causal influence? As we expect, they came at a stage in Ruggie’s career when he was already well established within the discipline, and able to devote considerable time

68 UN Doc. A/RES/S-6/3201. 69 Abbott and Snidal 2009; Auld, Gulbrandsen, and McDermott 2008. 70 Ruggie 1982. 71 Anti-corruption was later added as well. 72 Ruggie 2004. In the human rights realm, Ruggie has also developed a second policy effort, a set of Principles on Business and Human Rights, which were adopted by the member states of the UN Human Rights Council in 2011.

21 to policy work. Ruggie’s personal commitment to these issues and entrepreneurial spirit also sets him apart from many other scholars in the discipline.

6. Interactive influence

We argue that interaction has been the most important form of academic influence in international environmental policy. This form of influence is less direct than what we have termed causal influence. It recognizes that many academics participate in policy processes and influence them in ways other than attributable, “but for” causation. These may include shaping the information or beliefs policymakers hold, defining and differentiating potential options or strategies, evaluating past performance, or contextualizing the dilemmas policymakers face by relating them to similar cases in history, in other issue areas, or from other parts of the world.

We suggest that interactive influence is likely more common in environmental politics than in IR on average, for three reasons. First, expertise matters strongly in environmental politics because the identification of problems and the development of policy responses are fundamentally scientific in nature. For this reason, strong epistemic communities of experts pervade environmental politics. While these groups have traditionally been dominated by natural scientists, they have increasingly welcomed and prioritized social science, including IR. Second, academics who study environmental politics tend to have strong personal commitments to environmental protection. This gives them, on average, a greater interest and willingness to engage in environmental policy work. Third, the arenas of environmental policymaking are often more accessible to a wider range of actors than other spheres of politics. Multilateral environmental meetings and international organizations have a strong tradition of civil society participation, and the multitude of actors involved in the policy process gives academics a surfeit of interlocutors for engagement and influence. Below we highlight how these mechanisms have operated in several policy areas.

Reliance on technical expertise, including social science

The science-policy nexus is perhaps the most important avenue for interactive influence for GEP, and has been the focus of scholars for a quarter century.73 Given the scientific and technical nature of environmental problems, scientific assessments are a key political and institutional component of the policymaking process. These range from well-known long-standing institutions like the ongoing Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, to the three-year Global International Waters Assessment.

73 Haas 1989 is the seminal work on this topic, cited in our informal poll of leading scholars in the field as one of few works that has had extensive influence in IR beyond GEP.

22

Recent work by IR scholars examines whether and how large-scale scientific assessments of environmental issues can influence policy. They define assessments as “formal efforts to assemble selected knowledge with a view toward making it a possibility available in a form intended to be useful for decisionmaking.”74 Thus, the explicit goal of these bodies is to feed information into the policymaking process. Scientific assessments are a commonplace event in environmental politics; Mitchell and colleagues estimate that there were between two and three active assessments per year between the 1980s and 1990s.

Interestingly, they find that these assessments are “social processes rather than published products.”75 That is, interaction is a key component of influence. Assessments that are credible, salient and generated through legitimate means are more likely to have influence than those that do not.

Although we cannot track the participation of IR scholars across all of these assessments, there is certainly evidence of IR scholars’ participation in these processes. For instance, a number of political scientists have served on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, including David Victor, Mathew Paterson, Marc Levy and Navroz Dubash, Thomas Brewer and Axel Michaelowa.

In addition to scientific assessments, IR scholars have also been active participants in multilateral negotiations. Ted Parson participated in the ozone negotiations, and wrote a prize-winning political science book on the topic.76 Detlef Sprinz is a political scientist at the University of Potsdam who has served as Chairman of the Scientific Committee of the European Environment Agency. Axel Michaelowa at the University of Zurich has held a number of climate-related policy positions, including on the IPCC and the CDM Executive Board.

Furthermore, work on delegation to non-state actors indicates that states delegate to non-state actors—including experts—to help in the implementation of multilateral environmental agreements.77 A study of delegation to non-state actors in multilateral environmental agreements from 1902-2002, demonstrates that states most frequently delegate to private actors to help with the implementation of treaties, as opposed to tasking them with rulemaking, adjudication, enforcement or monitoring tasks. Moreover, once treaties have entered into force, and states must get down to the intricacies of achieving goals set out in the treaty, they are more likely to delegate to non-state actors—especially in areas that involve species management.78

74 Mitchell 2006, 3. 75 Ibid., 14. 76 Parson 2003. 77 Green 2008; Green 2014. 78 Green 2010.

23 Personal commitments to environmental practice Are GEP scholars more driven by personal commitment to environmental protection than, say, trade scholars are to free trade? The TRIP faculty survey data offer some evidence that they are.

In Table 2 we report the motivations scholars identify for undertaking research. As above, we use only the most recent year a scholar answered a question in order to avoid double-counting individuals while obtaining the largest possible sample. Because different questions are asked in different years and different scholars respond in different years, sample sizes vary by question. We conducted a Wald test to see if the identified differences between GEP and non-GEP scholars are significant. This test was somewhat limited, however, due to the small numbers of GEP scholars in our analysis samples.79

Consistent with our expectation, GEP scholars on average showed more commitment to their issue area than non-GEP scholars, with 45 percent citing it as a motivation for research compared to 39 percent of non-GEP scholars. At the same time, GEP scholars were less likely to be driven by methodology or paradigm than non-GEP scholars. However, there was no statistically significant difference between GEP and non-GEP scholars on the importance of policy relevance and current events on their research motivations, which we might have also expected.

Additionally, GEP scholars were slightly more likely to favor increased links between academic work and the policy world (93% compared to 89%), but did not differ significantly form other scholars as to the form those links should take.

79 Note that numbers of GEP scholars vary from 116 to 250 observations.

24 GEP Non-GEP Scholars Scholars Research motivations Appeal to popular audience 2% 3% Issue area 45% 39% * Methodology 0% 3% *** Other 11% 9% Paradigm 3% 5% * Policy relevance / current events 36% 33% Region 3% 7% *** Sample size 207 2710 Ideal relationship between academic

and policy communities There should be a higher wall of 7% 11% separation between the two * There should be a larger number of 93% 89% links between the two * Sample size 145 1985 Note: Wald tests were conducted to identify significant differences. *** p<0.01; ** p<0.05; * p<0.1. Table 2. GEP scholars vs. Non-GEP scholars

Permeability of environmental policymaking

International environmental politics are extraordinarily permeable. This quality allows interested academics to “get involved” with relatively few barriers to entry, facilitating engagement influence. Several features of the field create this accessibility.

First, since the 1972 Stockholm conference, much of global environmental policymaking has centered around multilateral institutions, especially the United Nations. Activist groups have successfully lobbied the UN for access to negotiations in the name of representation and legitimacy. In a multi-year study of 50 international organizations, Tallberg et al. finds that environmental institutions (along with human rights and development entities) are consistently more likely to involve transnational actors.80 Important climate change summits, for example, can attract tens of thousands of non-state actors, including many academics. Approximately 150 universities are officially registered observers of the UNFCCC.81

80 Tallberg et al. 2013. 81 Authors’ count of organizations listed on http://maindb.unfccc.int/public/ngo.pl?sort=const.og_name

25 The TRIP database also adds evidence for this claim. While GEP scholars were not generally more or less likely to engage in paid consulting work in the policy world than their non-GEP colleagues, the one significant exception is international organizations, with 15% of GEP scholars reporting that they had worked as paid consultants for such organizations in the previous two years, compared to 10% of non-GEP scholars (see Table 1). This difference is consistent with our argument that global environmental policymaking relatively permeable to academics.

Second, as noted above, environmental politics is increasingly characterized by complexity, with many different institutional layers—intergovernmental, domestic, transnational, etc.—playing a role in dense regime complexes. This proliferation of institutions and policy processes creates many potential access points for academics. For example, a scholar interested in engaging in policy work on, say, marine species protection, may approach a number of relevant intergovernmental organizations (such as the UN Food and Agriculture Organization or the various regional fisheries bodies), several large and many small NGOs that work on the issue, businesses involved in private regulatory schemes like the Marine Stewardship Council, multi-stakeholder alliances like the International Coral Reef Initiative (which combines governments, NGOs, and businesses, or any number of national regulatory authorities.

7. Conclusion

Two key findings emerge from this paper. First, we have argued that scholars of global environmental politics have had a meaningful influence on the policy realm. Most of this influence can be categorized as what we have termed “interactive influence”—GEP scholars are actively involved in specific policymaking processes alongside the government officials, NGOs, natural scientists, business groups, intergovernmental organizations, and other actors who shape environmental policy. We do not identify many instances of what we have termed “causal” influence, in which specific IR scholars or IR ideas have directly altered policy outcomes, and suggest there are systematic reasons to expect this form of influence to be rare. Finally, we have found growing resonance between GEP scholarship and international environmental policymaking over time, which we term “diffuse influence.”

Second, echoing other scholars,82 we have argued that the study of environmental politics has been undervalued in the discipline. As environmental policymaking becomes increasingly important to world politics, IR scholars, journals, and departments will need to increase their focus on environmental issues in order to remain relevant. At the same time, scholars studying primarily environmental issues could do more to frame their work for a broader IR audience.

82 Javeline 2014; Keohane 2014.

26

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