Lesson 1: Introduction and Basic Concepts

1.1: Key Concepts in Environmental Politics:

To get a discussion of how the governance of sustainability issues plays out, it is necessary first
to derive into key concepts that participate in building a frame of discussion that is used by
various actors when developing positions on these issues.

We begin here by focusing on two such concepts, the problems of public goods and negative
environmental externalities, and then discuss issues linked to environmental justice concerns.

These all help in building an understanding of how sustainability issues are understood in the
current context, and how governance is debated, designed, implemented, and contested.

Public Goods: they are defined as ones which have two characteristics:
- Non-Rival: if I choose to use or consume the good, it doesn’t affect the quantity
available to anyone else.
EG: the air we breathe from the atmosphere: the fact that I am breathing it doesn’t in
any way prevent someone else from breathing it as well. This is not the case for other
goods such as non-renewable resources, or food on the table during a meal.
- Non-Excludable: once the good exists, it isn’t possible for me to prevent someone from
getting access to it.
EG: air (again), it is impossible for me to prevent anyone from getting access to it.
Both characteristics can be modified by technology and human practices (that is, they are rarely
absolute).

The non-excludable aspect, for instance can by modified by technical or political possibilities: I
can restrict access to public beaches or national parks to those people willing and able to pay an
entry fee.

The same is true for land: while it was overwhelmingly public a few centuries ago, the creation
of private property regimes led to the privatization of ownership, and today, to grow crops or
build on land, you need to own it.

Non-rivalry is something that can be modified above a certain consumption threshold: a public
transit service (busses, subways) can be accessible to anyone in a non-rival way, but once too
many people use it, it leads to bottlenecks in access, and not everyone is able to get on it, even
though its free. Therefore, each good is a socio-historical and economic construct that is highly
dependent both on context and on political arrangements surrounding the good.

This leads to a few complications which are all related to Collective Action Problem (CAP).
- Tragedy of the Commons: A situation that arises because individuals behaving in a self-
interested manner end up producing a situation where the common good is negatively
affected.
 For instance, if anyone can get access to a given resource that exists in finite quantity,
there may be an incentive to each individual to get as much of the resource as possible
before anyone else can deplete it, which results in an unsustainable consumption of the
resource (Cod Crisis, 1990s).
The tragedy of the commons is far from inevitable, but rather it refers to the fact that an
arrangement will be necessary among the various individuals involved to manage the
public good sustainability.
- Free Rider Problem: Individuals having access to the good agree to restrain themselves
from consuming too much of it to ensure sustainability. Without any enforcement
mechanism, individuals may cheat on the rules imposed. Their consumption cannot
affect the overall sustainability, they gain an advantage from the arrangement without
bearing the cost of their share of the effort.

An additional feature of public goods is that just like most environmental problems, many don’t
correspond neatly with state territories and borders (EG: oceans do not belong to any individual
state, the same is true for global fish stocks).

This complicated the design of arrangements to ensure sustainable management of public

goods because the system of political relations around the world is very largely state-based,
where the sovereignty of individual states is a primary principle.

Environmental Externalities: A concept that is key in sustainability issues is externality.

- Externality: An economic agent creates, by its activity, an external effect by providing
someone else a utility or an advantage, or a damage, without compensation one way or
another.
EG: A firm owns a plant that produces one good and sells it to customers in the general
population.
This is a basic economic exchange, and we can assume that the price of the item more of less
corresponds to the combination of costs incurred by the firm (notably by buying raw materials
to build the product, buying energy to make the plant function, and paying workers a wage level
that they accept), and the customers’ willingness to spend that level to meet the need fulfilled
by the product.
In theory then, the exchange is beneficial to all parties involved: workers get paid for their work,
customers get their needs met by the product at a reasonable price that they can afford, and
the firm owners make a profit large enough for them to take the risks involved in building the
plant in the first place.
All the benefits and costs described so far are internal to the exchange, that is, they are
captured in the price of the exchange, to the satisfaction of all the agents involved.
It is easy, however, to imagine how this description is at very best incomplete, as the very
existence of this exchange, and the activities that it requires, creates other impacts. Some other
impacts we can think of are social, for instance, the impact on working conditions or on
competition with smaller local firms. Workers may also be unsatisfied with the wage levels, for
instance.
Similarly, the plant’s output may not merely be the build good: the manufacturing process may
reject toxic waste in the surrounding air and water, the distribution of the goods to retail stores
may involve air pollution from transport vehicles, and customers may dispose of plastic
wrapping when they use the good.

To understand the importance of this external impact, think of two things:

- Cost of Environmental Impact: The cost of the environmental impact isn’t factored in
the exchange.
EG: The plant releases toxic chemicals in a nearby water stream, endangering the public
health of people drinking it. This incurs a cost for population downstream, for instance
by adding the need to clean the water of the chemical, or by making people have to pay
for medical treatment after being poisoned.
Since this is external to the exchange (the price paid by customers buying and using the
product manufactured by the firm and its workers), these costs are not covered by the
firm or its customers and must be provided through other means: for instance,
downstream municipalities may need to impose taxes on their citizens to pay for the
additional water treatment to remove the chemical.
- Responsibility for Compensation: There is no correspondence between the people
concerned by the environmental harm and those involved in the exchange.
EG: We can imagine a few workers or firm owners that happen to live in some of the
affected municipalities, but most victims will likely not be owners of this firm, or workers
in it, or even customers of the good. So while there are some important benefits of the
exchange for the people involved, the victims of the externality are often people that
draw no benefit from this exchange.

The result of environmental externalities is that they create:

- Distributional Problem: unless a governance arrangement ensures that the firm is
forced to manage the harm or even eliminate it altogether, for instance through strict
regulations imposed by a government, it is hard to see how this discrepancy could be
resolved.
- Negative Environmental Externalities: result from a market failure: for various reasons,
from time to time market forces alone don’t result in the optimal allocation of resources
for the entire population, or for the environment itself.

Environmental Justice Issues: Problems associated with public goods and negative externalities
bring up two concerns related to environmental justice issues, which refer to the unfair
distribution of environmental benefits and burdens:
- Not all populations are affected equally by any given environmental harm. This is already
an important complication as described by the very definition of negative externalities,
but things get worse: most of the time, the main victims of environmental harms are
populations that are among the poorest and less politically influential.
This has the effect of not only making it harder for these populations to adapt to the
harm (because of their limited means to do so), but also to see an imbalance in the
 means they can deploy for this adaptation compared to the political and financial
resources available to actors responsible in the first place.
- Governance arrangements made necessary by these problems are designed through a
political process in which various groups compete for dominance. In other words, just
like any environmental externality has winners and losers, any governance arrangement
designed to address it will also have winners and losers.
This implies that putting in place such arrangements, in order to ensure sustainability, is
a political process, where some groups may be much less influential that others, for all
sorts of reasons: their financial resources, their capacity to organize and mobilize, their
social and political isolation, and so on.
In many cases the resulting arrangement is unsatisfactory to some more vulnerable
populations, meaning that the legitimacy of the arrangement is problematic for large
parts of the population, and in some cases even leads to armed conflict.

Discussions of environmental harms leads to discussions over sustainability, which highlights a

time aspect also related to environmental justice: it is easy to see that some arrangements
could be moving in the right direction in improving the management of public goods or reducing
environmental harms, but the pace at which they have an impact may not prevent the
depletion of the good or harm to the environment of certain populations.

In other words, the term sustainability refers to worsening over time, but not necessarily
immediately. This is part of the problem in that, we as humans, have difficulty grasping non-
immediate impacts. So, the difficulty of ensuring sustainability means that current populations
have a dominant position compared to future generations, which cannot intervene with what
needs to be done today.

Overall, these concepts help us highlight how contentious this process is. Public goods and
negative environmental externalities are central concepts in the governance of environmental
issues, and especially sustainability-related problems. To a large extent, public goods are
threatened by negative environmental externalities like unfettered finite resource depletion,
large scale pollution of oceans or the atmosphere, and many others.

Since these impacts are caused by humans and societies there is a need for coordination in
governance arrangements that prevent, manage, or compensate for these impacts, especially
before they reach a situation that is irreversible.

1.2: The Political Concept of Sustainability:

The interrelated concepts of public goods and environmental externalities help us understand a
number of problems in terms of the preservation of the ecosystems, but especially in terms of
the structural forces at play:
- Most human activity results in environmental harms.
- These harms are not taken into account correctly in dominant economic systems of
exchanges, as the environmental externality discussion makes clear.
 - This results in sustainability problems, because unless eliminated, better managed, or
compensated, human activity results in a constant accumulation of harms to the
environment. So the sustainability issue thus arises when it can be foreseen that this
accumulation will eventually be irreversible, for instance is a public good in the form of a
resource is completely depleted.
- The discussions linking sustainability and governance assume that this logic implies that
human action is often necessary to prevent, eliminate, temper, or manage these harms
to ensure that human impact on the environment is sustainable.

This logic underpins the understanding of sustainable development in political and policy
circles: sustainability, despite its direct link to the environment, is often defined in terms of an
impact by humans, on humans.

The distinction is important because sustainability is much more than simply this human-
centered concern. However, overwhelmingly, governance arrangements have largely been
developed to take care of this subset of sustainability problems.

This also sets up an important aspect of studying the governance of sustainability, which is that
the concept of sustainable development itself is politically charged, and specific definitions have
come to define the norm of global environmental policy making.

This definitional aspect is crucial, as in politics the definition of terms is important: it ends up
shaping political action, but it is also essential to recognize the different understandings of the
terms that may exist, as well as how this affects various clashes among social groups and public
authorities.

Our Common Future: The concept of sustainable development was coined in a report by the
World Commission on Environment and Development titled Our Common Future in 1987. This
report widely popularized a specific understanding of development and for a time, became the
key reference used in political, policy, academic, and business circles.
The report definition goes like this:
“Sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without
compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”
It is thus concerned with what some call the “ultimate” negative externality: the impact of our
activities on future generations’ resources.

Sustainable Development Policies: Sustainable development, as defined by the commission’s

report, involves a change in thinking about how development is pursued. For instance, finite
resource management, recycling, controlling, and managing negative environmental
externalities, are all aspects that came to be part of many industrial policies around the world.
The same is true for policies related to urbanization, the building sector, transport, and so on.
Sustainability Oversimplified: Simple and straightforward definitions are often useful to provide
common frames of reference to discuss complex issues, such as many sustainability questions.
However, this simplicity comes at the price of important caveats:
- Caveat 1: Despite sustainability having a universal reach and affecting large parts of
ecosystems and the populations inhabiting them, the direst social or political impacts of
negative environmental externalities like health-deleterious air and water pollution,
climate change-related natural disasters or resource depletion, or changing ecosystems
due to losses in biodiversity impact some groups more than others (externalities).
At first glance, the general principle of sustainable development as quoted from the
1987 report doesn’t offer similarly universal guidelines on how to treat this aspect.
- Caveat 2: A more important distinction in the socio-economic characteristics of
populations more vulnerable to the impacts of unsustainable practices.
Concretely, many of these populations also happen to be the least politically influential
ones, and the ones most affected by poverty. These populations often have the smallest
means to manage the challenges posed by unsustainable practices affecting their future
generations.
The 1987 report put a strong emphasis on this aspect in their arguments, putting
forward the urgency to put this aspect at core and center of governance arrangements
to improve sustainability.
Nevertheless, in some cases, the simplified definition is used, with limited considerations
of socio-economic differentiation among the social groups involved. In any case, this
dimension at least complicates the governance attempts related to sustainability issues.
- Caveat 3: How to factor in unforeseen technological developments. Another frequently
overlooked discussion in Our Common Future report is the limits imposed by
technology, which changes over time through innovation in a sometimes unpredictable
manner.
Some harmful and unsustainable impacts on the environment by industrial activity
change drastically when a new technology is discovered, diminishing the magnitude of
the impact, and changing the debate over the given sphere of activity. This poses a
significant challenge, because some may argue that research and innovation will
eventually solve most unsustainable impacts on the environment, but at the very least
we cannot plan for the rate of innovation that will come out of this research.
Will sufficiently drastic improvements be made to technology so that the environmental
harm will be made unharmful? Will sufficiently innovative solutions emerge at all?

The Politics of Sustainability: Although the 1987 definition has been greatly influential in
developing a general understanding, both need to place sustainability at the core of societies’
development as well as of what it means to do so, there has nevertheless been an evolution of
the concept in political circles:
Today, its definition has moved away from its origins and come to involve much more explicitly
some of the concerns about the described caveats. To illustrate this, we can look at major global
efforts to foster development over the past two decades.
 - MDGs: At the turn of the century, the Millennium Development Goals global agenda
(2000-2015) was launched by the UN with support from all 191 UN member states at the
time. The pact was an attempt to achieve 8 goals, including halving extreme poverty
around the world, reducing child mortality, and achieving universal primary education.
In this pact, sustainability was treated distinctly in goal #7, which was “to ensure
environmental sustainability”. More specifically, the goal stated that the primary target
was to integrate the principles of sustainable development into country policies and
programs, with relatively little specifications as to what this involved, but emphasizing
the protection of biodiversity, reversing the loss of environmental resources, and halving
the proportion of the population that was without sustainable access to safe drinking
water and basic sanitation.
- SDGs: The follow-up agenda, launched in 2015. Not only did sustainability show up in
the title of the agenda (Sustainable Development Goals Agenda), but it isn’t just
cosmetics: it illustrates that all 17 goals this time around all provide some contribution
to sustainability broadly understood, including again a central role for eradicating
poverty and improving basic education, but also many other issues such as clean energy
and climate action.

The Politics of Definitions: Definitions do two things:

- They determine the list of aspects, tools, and arrangements that will be considered in
high level circles.
- They aren’t set in stone and evolve over time.

Conclusion: In the realm of governance, sustainability is understood:

- In terms of concerns for humans, both in the sense of responsibility, that is (the need to
ensure that human activities are sustainable in terms of the impact they have on the
environment) but also in the sense of the essence of sustainability (unsustainable is
often simplified in terms of activities that would undermine humans’ survival, quality of
life, and so on).
- Definitions are a political exercise, and they are often contested. When giving attention
to analyzing governance issues related to sustainability, we will have to give special
attention to how this aspect shapes positions and political struggles.

1.3: The Political and Social Implications of Limits:

Concept of Limits: In an influential, if controversial, publication in 1972 entitle The Limits to

Growth, a group of researchers at MIT simulated economic and population growth with a finite
supply of resources, especially food production, industrialization, pollution, and consumption of
non-renewable natural resources. The report’s findings highlighted the limited capacity of the
earth to support this population growth over time.
So beyond the specifics of the methodology of the study, what is useful to our discussion is the
many forms and understandings that limits take when considered from a political and social
perspective and the implications of each of these for the governance of sustainability.
Despite the influence of the World Commission of Environment and Development’s (WCED)
definition of sustainable development, the use of the term since then by states and major
international organizations has been criticized as stretching the concept to a point where both
its usefulness and its correspondence to its original meaning are questionable.

Politics and the Notion of Limits: The WCED report’s definition explicitly relied on the notion of
limits:
- Sustainability implies that there are some limits that must never be reached.
- It’s necessary to ensure that there is equitable access to resources and technologies
around the world’s population.
There are some physical limits we must understand to put sustainable development principles
in practice, and several authors have worked since on defining what these are, and how they
relate more precisely to choices made about imposing certain constraints to human activity.

This is the conception that has been most influential in environmental policymaking so far,
which relies primarily on regulations that prohibit certain behaviours or fix minimum
environmental standards, for instance.

Planetary Boundaries: Publications by Rockstrom and Steffens from the Stockholm Resilience
Center and the Australian National University, respectively.
In trying to define a “safe operating space for humanity”, they defined 9 limits:

In their work, the contributors to the planetary boundaries framework highlight another
complication in applying the principles of sustainable development to inform governance: this
idea of irreversibility and interaction.
As the authors point out “Transgressing one or more planetary boundaries may be deleterious
or even catastrophic due to the risk of crossing thresholds that will trigger non-linear, abrupt
environmental change.
Moreover, crossing one boundary may affect other limits, and therefore the impact of crossing
any of the limits is highly uncertain.”

Putting Limits into Practice: Limits imply that at some point environmental protection must
come first: and its precisely this aspect that political leaders have had trouble putting into
practice, despite the fact that it’s the very essence of sustainable development.

Political Difficulty of Limits: Why are limits a concept that poses such difficulty in tackling
sustainability issues from a political or social perspective?
One reason is the complexity and ambiguity of limits. At least four rather different invocations
of limits appear in contemporary environmental arguments.
- Environmental: Environmental constraints experienced as a result of material
interactions among social and natural systems. Overfishing or overharvesting may result
in fish stock collapse or dead land, too high concentrations of pollution in the air has
public health impacts, or deforestation on slopes results in an increase in floods.
- Human Capacity: Human capacity to understand and manipulate nature. Rationality and
social organization, despite their spectacular sophistication in recent history, still fall
short in the face of nature’s complexity.
- Current Development Model: There is a notion of the limits of the current development
model and its capacity to satisfy human aspirations. Overconsumption and the never-
ending quest for material satisfaction, on top of the possibility of expanding this to all
corners of the world, are key components of these arguments.
- Self-Restraint: Limits appear as self-restraint, that is, we may choose to place limits on
our own individual or collective conduct, through social norms or legal rules that protect
the environment.

Policies to Enforce Limits: Now most political arguments about sustainability imply a
combination of some of these. But transforming these arguments into more concrete
implications for all forms of human activity and behaviour remains complex, not least because
even outside of the limits of the first kind, determining where other limits in this list actually lie
is far from straightforward, and represents at the very least a political exercise that is obviously
contentious.

Lesson 2: The Governance of Sustainability

2.1: Framework for Analyzing Sustainability Governance Issues

Governance: There are various definitions of governance, emphasizing different aspects of the
process of social and political organization around specific societal issues.
In a 2012 book on the topic entitled “Governance: A Very Short Introduction”, Mark Bevir, a
Professor of political science at the University of California, Berkeley, defined governance
broadly as: All processes of governing, whether undertaken by a government, market, or
network, whether over a family, tribe, formal or informal organization, or territory, and whether
through laws, norms, power, or language.
This may seem broad, but it highlights that governance is not only the governing activity of
governments, but also more diverse activities that blur the boundary of state and society.

Governance and Public Policy: Compared with other areas such as economic development,
health, and education, or transport, the environment and sustainability issues are relatively
newcomers in the purview of state intervention.
Only since the 1960s have states around the world started to get serious about developing
environmental policies and setting up formal institutions to deal with them: the United States
Environmental Protection Agency (U.S. EPA), for instance, was created in 1970, while the
Canadian government’s department of the environment (later renamed in various ways,
including Environment and Climate Change Canada) was created in 1971. Before then, very little
formal institutions existed that dealt explicitly with environmental issues.
This concern by public authorities at the state (and eventually provincial) level with
environmental issues led to a more significant presence of public authorities in the
management of environmental and sustainability issues, through the establishment of
environmental policies.

Public Policy:
 Set of actions taken by government authorities at different levels to deal with a host of
issues.
 It’s about solving or managing public problems, which is to say problems that concern a
sizeable portion of a country’s population.
 Different motivations, objectives, underlying ideologies, and other constraints shape the
policies that governments pursue and put in place.
Public policy takes many different forms, and emerges out of a sometimes complex process
involving four different aspects:
- Definition and Agenda-Setting:
 The identification of a problem and its definition must be done with enough
influence for it to be put on the government’s agenda.
EG: Air/water pollution was already a problem related to industrial activities
before the advent of environmental protection agencies in the early 1960s: what
changed, was the importance and understanding of these problems in political
circles.
 There may be competing definitions of the problem that exist: depending on how
the problem is defined, some groups may see it as beyond the responsibility of
governments, whereas others may not.
- Solutions: The choice of a governance arrangement as the preferred solution: here, the
definition becomes important, because it may influence the form that the policy takes,
or even which options are considered in the first place.
- Design and Implementation: The chosen policy must be put in place in a specific form,
and it must also be given a set of resources (budget, specialized staff, for instance).
 - Evaluation: Normally requires taking stock of the impact of the policy and to determine
whether its effective in achieving the objectives set forth by the policy. In other words,
once in place, is it solving the problem identified?

The Policy Process: Although for a time the study of the public policy process saw these
dimensions as stages. It has been recognized for some time that these overlap, interact, and
there is back and forth among these phases, so therefore it’s misleading to see them as distinct
and sequential steps.
Nonetheless, they clarify the various aspects involved in policymaking.

The Politics of the Policy Process: Each of these dimensions must be understood as a political
battle: often, there is contention over the choices and decisions made across these dimensions,
and even over whether the government should be intervening in the governance of this issue in
the first place.
Understanding sustainability policy, and any other type of governance arrangement for
sustainability-related problems, requires a careful and systematic analysis of key aspects of the
politics involved (in other words, who decides).

Analytical Framework: We build and apply a framework based on four dimensions:

 Dimension 1: Requires us to identify the definition of the problem, and whether
there is one or several formal governance agendas put in place to manage it.
There may be competing definitions to the problem discussed, and these
compete for attention from policy circles. In other words, is the problem, at least
in one specific form, on the formal public policy agenda of government
authorities?
In the end, this is crucial because the problem definitions are partly political and
end up being very influential in shaping the choice of solutions considered to
solve it by dominant actors (public authorities, major organizations, etc..).
 Dimension 2: Actors and groups concerned by the problem:
1. Beyond ideological positions, what are the main concerns of different social
groups?
2. Which groups are politically powerful and why?
3. What are the positions and are they compatible and reconcilable?
4. Very rarely is the entire population equally victim of the issue, therefore
some groups will have a much stronger motivation to mobilize and influence
the governance of the issue, especially public policy.
 Dimension 3: Institutions, norms, and current practices.
1. Institutions are a set of formal rules, informal norms, or shard understandings
that constrain and prescribe political actors’ interactions with one another.
2. There are various reasons why people adhere to institutions, whether it is in
order to avoid formal penalties and maximize benefits, or because of their
perception of what is an appropriate course of action. In the end, what is of
particular interest to us is to look at these various influences on people
including decision-makers.
 3. In public policy, institutions constrain what solution end up being considered,
and which may come from something as simple as the legacy of how the
problem has been dealt with in the past. Sometimes this is a good thing, as
policy experience helps improve effectiveness because there is a well-tested
way of managing similar issues that’s been tried in the past.
Sometimes this may be problematic however, as the legacy shapes policy
responses, even in cases where it may not be the best or most effective way
of dealing with a given sustainability issue.
 Dimension 4: Governance arrangement objectives and effectiveness: when a
governance arrangement exists or is put in place to address a sustainability issue,
are there clear objectives related to the problem definition?
Is it possible to determine whether the arrangement is effective or not?
These dimensions help us make sense of societies’ responses to sustainability issues. The
purpose of governance arrangement being to solve or improve a problem identified as
important, therefore, one key question is whether the arrangement in place can realistically do
so, and whether we know how to determine whether this is the case.
This framework helps us map out the elements needed to better understand these societal or
governmental responses.

Lesson 2.2: Basic Policy Instruments

Policy instruments are techniques of governance used by public authorities to achieve

objectives set out in public policies.

Policy Approaches to Governing Sustainability: Various rationales may underpin public policies
aiming to solve or manage a sustainability issue, for instance:
- The policy may be an attempt to eliminate an environmental harm that has been
identified as having deleterious effects on health.
EG: Air pollution or smog.
- The government may also be using a policy to correct a market failure, in other words,
an instance where normal market exchanges don’t take into account negative
environmental externalities.
- Public authorities may also be attempting to force certain actors to take responsibility
through applying the polluter pays principle, which refers to the use of fiscal tools to
ensure that actors that produce pollution, for instance, also bear most of the cost to pay
for its impact, whether through the cleaning of industrial or mining sites, or by imposing
certain minimal norms in the practices of an industry or individuals.

Categories of Public Policy Instruments: Governments can use a long list of policy instruments
to achieve one or several of these objectives. Several authors have attempted to classify these
categories in different ways, here is one straightforward classification of instruments.
 Regulation (Command-and-Control): These are mandatory constraints imposed
by the government to limit or orient a given type of activity. The objective is to
control the way in which the activity is carried on. In terms of strengths, the idea
 is that it allows the creation of a clear, stable, and official framework for actors to
operate, and if done well, it can ensure that environmental harms are minimized
to an acceptable level.
EG: Delivering permits (oil exploration), construction codes (imposing certain
materials for insulation), fuel consumption standards (car manufacturers).
 Economic: These are used by the State to modify behaviours by changing the
economic value associated with it, either increasing it or decreasing it.
EG: Taxes on gasoline, to encourage use of public transit or buying of more fuel-
efficient cars. Manufacturers are also encouraged to innovate and build more
efficient vehicles, since customers will prefer them in this situation.
Governments may also encourage certain behaviours by decreasing the relative
costs of certain choices, for instance by providing financial help to people buying
electric cars, or low-interest loans or subsidies for industries that want to
modernize and decrease their environmental impact using better technologies.
The idea here is to make sure that the financial burden for pollution is put on
specific behaviours or activities, so that externalities are internalized: in other
words, those polluting or causing environmental harm are those paying the cost.
 Cooperation: These focus on fostering cooperation. These include voluntary
agreements among actors, for instance, when public authorities strike a deal with
industrial actors so that they do certain improvements in terms of sustainability,
in exchange for not using other more constraining policy instruments like formal
norms or taxes.
Another example is action by the state to create and foster networking among
actors of a certain economic sector, to facilitate collaboration and encourage
environmental innovation.
 Information & Education: This focuses on providing information aiming to
improve the population’s knowledge about sustainability issues, in order to
modify their preferences and values so that they adopt a more sustainable
behaviour.
EG: Education campaign, for instance ads by the government to share
information that may be unknown to the public, in terms of home-based
practices to reduce energy needs, or programs to encourage recycling and
composting.
The use of labels and certificates, which indicate that a certain product meets
higher environmental standards, for instance Energy Star.
This is normally done to fix a market failure that relates to the fact that the
information is not easily accessible to a category of actors (for instance, the
general public). In other words, the policy here fixes the insufficient information
issue and allows for more informed choices to be made.

The Variety in Policy Instruments: The categories above cover a long list of policy options, and
therefore, we will need to pay attention to the reasons that lead some governments to favour
instruments over other in given cases. What do we need to consider here in understanding this
variety?
  Variation by degree of constraint: The categories listed previously are in order of
the level of constraint that they impose on targeted actors
- Regulation imposing a strong constraint (although the regulations to meet may
not be very demanding, not meeting them leads to serious and clear penalties.
- Economic instruments are a lower level of constraint, because although they
may be particularly costly in the cases of stiff taxes, they still allow actors to do
the environmentally harmful action if they are ready to pay for it.
- Cooperation instruments are much looser constraints, especially if the
requirements asked by governments are voluntary.
- Education campaigns present little constraint, at least in the short term.
 Political competition over this choice: The variation in degree of constraints tells
us that certain actors may prefer some instruments over others, with actors who
favour stronger action also favouring more constraining instruments, and vice-
versa.
 Effectiveness in resolving the sustainability issue identified: Ideally, we would
like decision-makers to choose policies that are the most effective in solving the
sustainability issue that has been identified, whether it’s related to reducing
pollution, or improving land and forest management, preventing losses in
biodiversity, etc. There is at least an assessment done in competent public
administrations of what the most effective choice is. However, a large part of this
choice will necessarily be political.
- Effectiveness depends on the exact definition of the problem: for instance,
decreasing air pollution from a specific activity is not the same as eliminating it.
Therefore, less stringent policies could be effective in achieving a decrease, but
grossly insufficient in achieving the latter.
- The choice of policy will also depend on how successful the various actors
involved are at defending their preferences.
- Effectiveness may also partly depend on the administrative capacity to
implement the policy: budget constraints, for instance, may have an impact on
whether a state chooses subsidies to encourage environmental innovation.
- Administrative experience is important as well: taxes for instance, are often
much easier instruments for states to impose, since they may already have a
revenue agency that does so, whereas complex arrangements may require new
expertise which the government doesn’t have at first.

Lesson 2.3: Case Study: Municipal Recycling Collection Services

Most urban centers across Canada do garbage and recycling collection. Municipal authorities
have a relatively long tradition of offering waste collection. In fact, in many places and especially
for smaller municipalities, it is one of the main services that the city’s administration provides to
citizens.
Waste management was minimal for most of the 20th century: waste-related services consisted
mainly of sending the waste to disposal sites, and various basic techniques to optimize the
space that waste was taking in landfills.

With the rising concerns over sustainability in the 1970s, there was a push across North America
to begin organizing a governance of recycling.

Analytical Framework:
1. Problem Identification and Definition:
Some of the key aspects of the problem were:
- Resource management issues: Already in the 1970s-80s there were significant concerns
over production and consumption systems that didn’t consider the cost of waste for
societies around the world, notably through the impact on resource depletion (This is an
example of an externality: the cost of managing waste is left to the public at large –
typically managed through their taxes and municipal authorities).
- Land issues: As consumption increases exploded in the post-WW2 period, landfills
became larger, putting strains over the municipal authorities’ capacity to deal with ever-
increasing quantities of waste. Costs began to skyrocket as smaller and more local
landfills became full and municipalities had to turn to disposal sites far away, increasing
the cost of waste management.
- Other environmental issues include climate change and water pollution.

Recycling was seen through the lens of alleviating pressure on waste management, by
removing a quantity as large as possible from other waste and sending the material to
recycling centers, where a large part of it could be transformed to get a second life,
decreasing pressure on resources as well.
2. Actors, Groups and Positions Defended:
Groups and individuals with concerns about this problem:
- Environmental groups, some citizens, and some politicians in municipal authorities with
budget constraints were putting forward the argument about sustainability: they saw a
problem in the lack of waste management, either in immediate terms (dealing with the
large quantities of waste that societies produced, and the pollution that resulted from it)
or on the longer term (pressure on natural resources, for instance).
- Citizens, some local businesses, and other politicians were concerned about the
introduction of a service of a certain form: cities collecting, recycling, for instance,
involved forcing people to be more active in their own waste management at home (an
annoyance to many citizens and an added cost for businesses), and also implied an
additional cost to municipalities with limited budgets, meaning that local taxes would
necessarily be increased to pay for such a service.

These concerns had to be reconciled for the end solution proposed, the governance
agreement, to be satisfactory to a majority of actors.
3. Institutions, Norms, & Current Practices:
 When recycling collection services began in many municipalities, little to no such
services existed on that scale. Therefore, infrastructure like facilities to process recycling
were rare, and those that existed didn’t have sufficient capacity to absorb the rapid
increase in the quantity that they would receive, especially those attached with large
urban centers.
As may be expected, collection operations were largely modelled after waste collection,
that is, trucks going around every household and business every week or two weeks and
delivering their content to local centers or directly to recycling facilities.
In most places, people were provided with standardized bins, sometimes in different
colors, to clearly identify materials that were sorted from other trash.
4. Policy Objectives and Effectiveness
Determining effectiveness depends on the definition of the problem used, as well as on
the policy objectives laid out.
On the face of it, at first there is at least a significant gap between before and after the
introduction of such services. If households and businesses were all throwing away all
waste in their trash before the advent of the recycling collection, then it is safe to
assume that at least a share of them now sort their trash and use the recycling bin and a
collection service for a certain part of their trash.
In theory as well, the bin content collected by the city’s service is processed and further
sorted in recycling centers, and the materials are then sold to businesses to be reused.

In practice, we know that this is an ideal picture, so the question of effectiveness is how
far are we from this ideal?
It depends on the definition of the problem. Recycling rates may be low, meaning that
many people just don’t sort their trash, put out the bins for collection, or sort their trash
incorrectly.
EG: In Montreal, which has had curbside collection since the end of the 1980s, recycling
rates are stuck at around 60%, clearly illustrating that providing the collection service is
no guarantee that people will use it to its full potential.
Furthermore, the performance of recycling processing centers may be low: many centers
in North America, have trouble transforming the plastic they receive into material that
can be realistically reused, at a reasonable cost. Therefore, even if the rate of
households and businesses sorting their plastic and using the collection service is high,
in the end if this plastic isn’t recycled, there is little value added to this effort.
Therefore, evaluating effectiveness is multidimensional, and must include considerations
such as the cost of processing the materials into reusable ones, the markets for recycled
materials (that is, the capacity of recycling centers to sell their products on markets), on
top of the issue of optimizing the collection service itself.

Beyond these managerial aspects, lie other policy objectives that should be included in
this assessment:
Is the service reducing pressure on landfills? Is it facilitating the efforts to reduce
pollution from these sites? Is the service participating in creating a culture where
recycling is the norm rather than the exception? Is it, simultaneously, educating the
 population at large about the benefits and workings of recycling, and by extension,
reducing consumption?

Curbside collection in North America didn’t become widespread before well into the
1990s, so the fact that this entirely new habit was taken up to a significant extent by the
population, and that it has largely become the norm in many municipalities in only a few
years, has to be considered a significant change in and on itself, despite that fact that
there is room for improvement (even the chasing arrows international logo of recycling
is less than 50 years old).

So, what is a relatively straightforward program to collect recycling materials from

households and local businesses must evolve into something more complex if we really
want it to have the maximum benefits on society at large. It is normal then, that such a
governance arrangement, must evolve as. It becomes more common, and as the context
changes.

Lesson 2.4: Case Study: The Ontario Green Energy and Green Economy Act

The Green Energy and Green Economy Act (GEA): was introduced in 2009, in Ontario to foster
the deployment of renewable energy technologies in the province, mainly in the electricity
sector, for instance wind turbines, rooftop solar panels, and so on.
The GEA was introduced at a time when Ontario’s manufacturing sector, especially in the
automobile sector, had seen important job losses, and unemployment in the sector was very
high.

Analytical Framework:
1. Problem Identification and Definition
 Reducing GHGs: Although the GEA is a complex piece of legislation with various
provisions, it is generally thought that one of its key objectives was to address
the need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions linked to climate change, by
fostering the deployment of renewable sources of electricity generation in the
province of Ontario, notably wind and solar energy.
These technologies don’t emit any greenhouse gasses or other air pollutants
when generating electricity, which represents an improvement over other, more
conventional technologies like coal or natural gas, which both release GHGs
when they are burned to produce electricity.
At its core then, the idea was to address a market barrier thought to be
preventing renewables from expanding their share in Ontario’s electricity mix.
 Changing the Electricity Mix: Although at the time, nuclear energy and coal were
the dominant sources of electricity in Ontario, with hydropower and gas making
up most of the rest. Given the higher prices associated with wind and solar
power compared with conventional generation, it was difficult for these sources
to see an expansion.
 However, it was widely thought at the time that this was an example of a market
barrier that could be overcome by government action: prices for wind and solar
energy were high largely because they were rarer, and therefore a significant
expansion of their installations should lead to economics of scale and a drop in
prices, it was thought.
This had been indeed experimented in other countries like Germany and
Denmark.
 Policy Approach: The GEA used policy instruments, notably a feed-in tariff, that
were designed to eliminate the market barrier1 for renewables.
In this case, it looks like this:
a. Renewables = high cost = limited market share: Despite social and
environmental benefits, renewables like wind and solar had difficulty
gaining a larger share because of high costs.
b. Economies of scale = decrease in these costs: Costs would be brought
down if only economies of scale could materialize from a large quantity of
these technologies being manufactured and sold.
c. Eliminating a requires b, but b cannot happen in the presence of a:
Because these costs were currently high and not competitive with other
forms of energy like coal, it wasn’t possible for manufacturers to see the
economies of scale materialize to bring costs down.
d. GEA fixes this barrier by “forcing” b, which eventually eliminates a: The
GEA was intended to fix this barrier by forcing the deployment and
payment of the higher cost until a manufacturing sector would develop
and bring down the cost, after which renewables could compete with
other energies on their own.
 Comprehensive Energy Policy: Renewables were part of the answer, but
conservation and efficiency improvements in the use of electricity would also be
necessary given the large quantity that coal provided at the time.
The GEA was introduced in the aftermath of the global financial crisis of 2008,
which had rocked the Ontario economy and particularly already ailing
manufacturing sector.
As a result, it was thought that the GEA could hit two birds with one stone: by
encouraging the deployment of renewable energy as well as increasing efficiency
in electricity use, a new green energy industry would be created with jobs, some
of them in manufacturing wind and solar power technologies.
The problem was thus defined as multidimensional even though it was (and still
is) often advertised as one specifically dedicated to encouraging renewable
energy and reducing GHG emissions. The design of the policy was influenced by
this attempt to cover all these dimensions.
2. Actors, Groups and Positions Defended:
 Supporting Groups: The definition of the problem had impacts on the design of
the policy, and on the choice of policy instruments that it would contain. We can
1 Market barrier: a situation where a new competitor cannot gain entry to a market because of the high initial
costs, despite the fact that this new actor or technology would be competitive if this initial cost was removed.
 already see this by looking at how support and opposition to the program played
out:
The GEA was supported by a large coalition of environmental groups, many
which created the Green Energy Act Alliance, dedicated to promoting the acts
benefits.
The alliance included for instance the Environmental Defense organization, and
the Ontario Sustainable Energy Association. The alliance also included industrial
and professional associations linked to renewable energy, notably Shine Ontario
for the solar industry, and the Canadian Wind Energy Association. Farmers were
also supportive of the act through the Ontario Federation of Agriculture.
Despite the larger costs associated with renewables at the time, as well as the
dominant position and influence of conventional electricity sources in Ontario,
several businesses and labour groups such as the United Steelworkers of Canada
gave their support to the act given its formal commitment to fostering a
domestic industry and creating jobs largely seen as a way to reboot the economy
and the manufacturing sector after the financial crisis.
 Positions Defended: Understanding the positions of the different groups is
important because support for a program is not a one-shot deal; it must be
maintained over time, in light of the results.
While there were several opponents to the program, mostly revolving around the
argument that it was too costly compared to replacing coal with natural gas or
nuclear energy, for instance, the support of various groups emboldened the
government’s plans to focus on renewables.
Therefore, two things should be noted:
- Eventually, the act drew broad support in the population and in the
various associations and lobby groups, including those with
environmental concerns, business concerns, and labour concerns. The
preamble of the program, which specified that the act was both intended
to foster a green economy and renewable energy deployment, and the
claim by the government that the program would create 50,000 direct
and indirect jobs in the first three years, formalized this strategy for
obtaining broad support and compensating opposition, which came from
groups such as large industrial consumers, which would see their
electricity prices increase, for instance.
- This problem definition raised the bar for the programs success: to
maintain its support, the program now had not only to increase
renewable deployment substantially, but also to create a very large
number of jobs in the sector. Failure to meet any of these targets would
dissolve the coalition of support, and risk endangering the long-term
viability of the program.
It’s interesting to note that the problem definition, in this case the choice to
include at the forefront the job creation aspect, was instrumental in ensuring
broad support for the renewables legislation.
 Institutions, Norms, & Current Practices:
 - Policy Experience: In the years preceding the enactment of the GEA,
there was no norm or substantial experience with encouraging renewable
energy deployment to such a scale. The policy and institutional design
were influenced by two sources:
1. At the time, fostering renewable energy deployment already existed
in various jurisdictions around the world, and a limited number of
policy instruments were used. Ontario’s government was strongly
influenced by the German program, the German program which had
been in place for almost 20 years at the time and was thought to be
the best way to achieve the province’s multiple objectives of
increasing renewables’ shares and creating jobs.
2. There was some limited experience in Ontario. Over the previous few
years, the same government had in place a Renewable Energy
Standard Offer Program, which guaranteed a fixed price to renewable
energy developers at an above-market rate: in other words, if you
wanted to develop a wind energy project, the government’s program
would give you a contract in which you were guaranteed a high rate
for electricity for a fixed number of years. To a large extent, the GEA
represented a more sophisticated version of this instrument.
The province’s earlier experience also highlighted some problems with
the way that this support was provided, as municipalities all had different
criteria for evaluating the projects.
The GEA aimed to streamline the process of project approval, given the
administrative difficulties in approving the grid connection projects in the
earlier program.
So a mix of local and international policy experience influenced the
program design, which largely necessitated the reorganization of
government institutions: the Ontario Ministry of the environment and
infrastructure would administer the program, centralizing the project
approval process away from municipalities.
3. Policy Objectives and Effectiveness:
 Assessing the Impact of the Policy: Officially, the three objectives of the program
were to:
1. Create 50,000 jobs in three years linked to the renewable energy
sector: The Ontario government admitted in 2013 that it had missed
the 50,000 jobs figure by a wide margin, and opponents to the
program were quick to point out that even the government’s job
creation estimate was problematic because many of these jobs were
relatively temporary construction jobs, not permanent manufacturing
ones.
2. Foster renewable energy, notably wind and solar and reduce overall
consumption: Looking at Ontario’s emissions first, it seems like overall
GHG emissions went down since 2009. However, this cannot be
ascribed entirely to the GEA, since some coal-fired generation was
 replaced by gas-fired power plants which emit much less GHGs. In
terms of numbers, we can see that solar and wind energy installations
did go up substantially since the act. But here the objective is a bit
vaguer: what exactly is the satisfactory rate of installations? At the
end of 2016, wind and solar still accounted for less than 15% of the
province’s electricity mix.
3. Improve conservation and efficiency in energy use to reduce overall
consumption.
Somewhat unofficially, other objectives were central to the program’s
implementation: Necessity for the expansion of renewables to lead to a
drop in prices, eventually making government support unnecessary.
This eventually led to an export capacity from Ontario manufactures,
given the increasing appetite around the world for technologies such as
wind turbines and solar panels.
 Key Takeaways: The assessment of the program is multifaced and complex, and
determining whether you see it as a success or not is largely dependent on the
importance you give to center assumptions:
- Domestic Content Requirements as a Policy Instrument: To ensure the
development of a local industry, the program forced projects to meet
domestic content requirements, requiring manufacturers and developers
from importing technologies from foreign manufacturers even when
these were cheaper.
The provision was challenged at the World Trade Organization by Japan
and the European Union, which eventually won which forced the
government to remove this clause. This led to the demise of the
province’s sector starting in 2013, when this was applied, affecting even
more the negative prospects of job creation.
This also neglected the objective of developing an export capacity in the
province, the second of the objectives listed as unofficial.
- Matching Sustainability Objectives with Social Concerns: Maintaining
public support for the cause versus maintaining public support for the
means chosen to deal with the problem are distinct things, but in the
end, they are indissociable.
A broad coalition of support requires the matching of sustainability
objectives with other social and economic concerns. But this may be
tricky and ultimately work against the original intent.
- Hierarchy in Multiple Objectives: Another consideration is whether there
was a hierarchy in the objectives. Was it more important to create 50,000
jobs and an export capacity? Or was it mostly about installing renewables
and reducing GHG emissions? Not all groups in the coalition of support
were on the same page on this, and therefore some groups from the
renewable energy industry and environmental groups continued their
support even though they argued for changes in the years after 2012,
while manufacturers and labour groups were more concerned by the
 failure in terms of the industrial policy objectives set out in the act, with
some withdrawing their support completely.
Was it a mistake to include the job creation objective as part of the preamble of
the act? Without it, it’s uncertain whether the program would have had enough
public support to last.
But this emphasis also led to its first criticism, which resulted in a frame of
discussion for the program’s effectiveness and costs, as the discussion became
about the jobs that it created (or failed to create), as opposed to the cost of
fostering renewables in the way that it chose to.

Lesson 3: Global Sustainability Governance

The International and Global Dimensions of Governance: In a way, this international dimension
adds a layer of complexity to attempts to improve the governance of sustainability. Despite the
important influence and role of non-state actors like NGOs and corporations, the international
system is still very much a state-based system, where territorial sovereignty is the overarching
principle.
In practice, this suggests that any discussions over solutions to environmental problems that
cross state borders must involve distinct political authorities, which will negotiate to find an
arrangement that they all accept. This comes in addition to all the difficulties already discussed
in the previous lesson.
This represents a key aspect of governance and sustainability, since many – if not all –
sustainability problems do not neatly correspond with state delimitations: water and air
pollution, resource depletion, climate change, and many other sustainability problems are faced
similarly by several states, and their cooperation is necessary if their attempts to resolve these
problems are to have any meaningful success.

Lesson 3.1: International and Global Governance Arrangements

How Does Governance Go Beyond States? At the international level, governance arrangements
come in various forma, which we can distinguish crudely as follows:
1. Multilateral treaties among states, specifically focused on environmental problems:
This is perhaps what most people have in mind when thinking about international
arrangements for the governance of environmental problems: the Paris agreement on
climate change, or the Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer,
for instance, fall under this category.
2. Components of treaties on other issues designed to address environmental aspects:
They do not specifically deal with environmental problems, but address environmental
concerns linked to the general issue covered by the arrangement. For instance,
environmental protection rules within trade agreements.
3. Private initiatives: Private group efforts to improve sustainability practices linked to the
individual of firm behaviour and activities (fair trade or organic certifications, initiatives
to denounce problematic behaviours or practices, non-profit watchdogs, and
 international lobbying efforts by groups operating in several countries like Greenpeace,
the Sierra Club, etc.).
These forms coexist and even overlap in some cases, which makes the international or global
arrangements to improve sustainability issues a potentially messy political arena.

Bilateral and Multilateral Treaties (1.): State-based international governance arrangements

specifically dedicated to environmental issues have so far resulted in a plethora of
arrangements, sometimes overlapping.
One way of looking at the variation is along two dimensions: how narrow is the scope of the
issue covered, and how localized is participation in the agreement.
- Very issue-specific, and very localized: for instance, the Air Quality
Agreement is an environmental treaty between Canada and the US,
signed in 1991. It is often referred to as the Acid Rain Treaty.
- Very issue-specific but involve a larger number of countries: for instance,
the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITIES) has
induced behavioural change by focusing on trade impacts on biodiversity.
- Broader in the scope of the issues covered, while still being locally
circumscribed: for instance, the Canada-Chile agreement on
environmental cooperation. The agreement only concerns collaborations
between two countries, the issues it covers are potentially very broad.
- Both broad in scope and in the number of states involved: for instance,
the Paris Agreement on climate change, or the United Nations Framework
Convention on Climate Change, with near universal membership and
considerations on all the sustainability-related aspects of the climate
change problem.

There are various reasons for this variation, many of which are historical: some of these came
out of relationships among countries that developed over various issues, eventually creating
collaborative approaches to environmental issues. Others are outgoing of past collaboration on
specific issues, and others still are top-down efforts coming from the international community,
for instance through the UN agenda.

Components or Side-Arrangements to Non-Environmental Treaties (2.): Another form of

formal international governance pertaining to sustainability and environmental protection
comes in the form of components or side-agreements to treaties that focus on matters other
than environments.
These components can be seen as parts of, or add-ons to various types of arrangements among
states.
Trade agreements have been contentious in debates over sustainability given the potential
negative repercussions on environmental standards around the world.
Worries have left governments eager to include environmental-related provisions in agreements
on various matters.

EG:
1. The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA): was a trilateral treaty (Canada,
US, Mexico) which aimed to minimize trade barriers. The agreement took effect in 1994.
More recently, negotiations among the three partners have led to the signature of a
follow-up, revised agreement in 2018, although it remains unclear whether the
agreement will be ratified by all three countries in its current form.
When NAFTA was signed, environmental groups built a significant lobbying campaign to
raise concerns about the environmental impact of both the increased trade, which was
expected to result from the agreement, and the rules that the agreement contained to
achieve this.
On top of concerns about the impact of trade on the environment, the general fear was
that NAFTA didn’t contain any provisions to allow states to use environmental standards
enforced in one of the signatory countries but not another.
The fear was that such agreements would inevitably result in a “race to the bottom”
among member countries, with companies displacing activities to the country with the
least stringent environmental regulations, creating an incentive for all countries to
minimize environmental regulations in this competitive environment.
In part to allay these fears, a companion agreement was signed, creating the
Commission for Environmental Cooperation (CEC), with the mandate to foster
environmental protection in a joint effort by the three countries.
Although NAFTA contains no mention of rules regarding environmental protections, its
add-on CEC provides a formal recognition that these must at least be discussed, however
insufficient that arrangement may be.
2. The World Trade Organization (WTO): is an international institution designed to
administer trade rules and agreements around the world, as well as provide a forum for
negotiations and the settlement of disputes.
It took effect in 1995 and represented the continuation of the General Agreement on
Tariffs and Trade, a series of multilateral agreements on trade measures that
progressively decreased barriers to trade following WW2.
 Although the WTO is concerned with minimizing the potential use of various
justifications as barriers to trade, it tried to keep these exceptions as limited as possible,
allowing exceptions only in cases specified in the agreement (national security or health
concerns, for instance).
In the case of environmental protection, on the face of it at least, the WTO doesn’t
contain any chapter specifically destined to list allowable exclusions related to
environmental protection or sustainability.
Environmental trade measures must be non-discriminatory, that is, they should not
discriminate between similar products from different WTO members.
If environmental treaties target products merely because of how they are produced and
made, for instance, the resulting trade restrictions are often seen to be breaking WTO
obligations.
Nevertheless, the experience with the WTO and its dispute settlement mechanism since
1995 provides a more nuanced picture in terms of its impact on environmental
regulations among member states.
Notably, Article 20 of the WTO agreement that allows states to make decisions based on
the interest of human, animal, or plant life and health.
As a result, this opens the door for environmental protection.
In theory, members are thus permitted to impose any limitation they see as necessary to
combat serious risk to the environment or human health, but the limitation must be
justified with scientific evidence, and must result in a restriction on trade that is as
minimal as possible.
Since its inception, WTO members have used various environmental protection
justification in cases where these were seen as compatible with WTO rules.
Perhaps this is in line with the Marrakesh Agreement Establishing the WTO, which lists
sustainable development and environmental protection as explicit objectives for the
trading system.
Although not legally binding, the preamble of the Marrakesh Agreement represents an
important departure from the GATT’s previous philosophy of a strict separation of trade
and environmental policy.
Furthermore, because the WTO also strengthened the GATT’s dispute settlement
mechanism and mate its rulings legally binding, the evolving WTO jurisdiction on cases
involving environmental trade measures have assumed greater importance in balancing
the competing perspectives of trade and environmental protection.

Private Initiatives (3.): governance arrangements or self-imposed efforts also exist through the
actions of private actors.
1. The international non-governmental organizations (INGOs) in the environmental sector,
this label often refers to large environmental NGOs with global reach, such as
Greenpeace.
These organizations go beyond raising awareness or lobbying governments and
corporations, or organizing protests: some put in place efforts to help improve the
sustainability of certain practices:
  Certification Efforts: One such tool used is certification efforts, which comes in
various forms:
One is fair trade certification, which is an institutional arrangement put in place
to help producers in low-income countries achieve better trading conditions.
Importantly, although one objective is to raise the payment to exporters up to an
acceptable level, the movement also aims at improved social and environmental
standards, promoting sustainable development.
The movement mostly targets commodities like coffee, cocoa, sugar, fresh fruit,
or flowers.
This leads to consumers being able to identify simply and easily which products
they buy have the fair trade stamp and make more informed choices about the
sustainability criteria met in the production of the good.
Although initially done only at a very small scale, large multinationals like Nestlé
and Starbucks now use fair trade goods like coffee in their operations.
The environmental sustainability aspect of fair trade efforts cannot be
understated.
In regions where coffee, for instance, is the most important export crop, its
production transforms nature and agriculture.
Increased productivity made necessary by the growing size of plantations let to
agriculture in unshaded rows and decreased diversity of the forest
Animal diversity also decreased because of lower plant diversity, and this type of
production also led to more soil erosion, and the use of chemicals like fertilizers
and insecticides. Fair trade certification is only given to activities that make
substantial efforts to minimize these kinds of impacts.
 Reporting Efforts: INGOs often have substantial means and expertise to assess
environmental impacts, often superior to individual governments.
Therefore, they publish various studies and reports on sustainability issues; the
oceans, the climate, the state of governmental efforts to support sustainability
measures or, on the contrary, support activities and industries not respecting
sustainability principles, the list goes on.
 Participation in High-level Forums: INGOs participate in high-level forums and
negotiations on the elaboration of governance arrangements (climate change
negotiations, for instance).
Even if they don’t have formal decision-making power, their presence ensures
that certain topics will be put on the agenda by states.
2. Strategies put in place by private corporations, sometimes individually and other times
in collaborative efforts, to improve the sustainability of their own practices.
These strategies go beyond what is dictated by government regulations and laws, and
often participate in their corporation trying to gain an edge over competitors often sold
as greenness, in order to satisfy customer preferences.
 Walmart: put in place goals to improve the sustainability of both its own
practices and those of its main suppliers.
Walmart has pledged to be powered by 100% renewable energy and create zero
waste, notably.
 It has also launched a program to reduce emissions from its value chain and the
supply chain of its suppliers.
 Costco: has committed to meeting the requirements of Leadership in Energy and
Environmental Design (LEED) for its warehouses, notably by using a large share of
recycled materials in their construction requirements.
The company also pledged to give special attention to water efficiency and
sustainable landscaping for its new buildings.

Both companies have a significant number of warehouses and stores around the
world, which implies that their leadership can possibly have an impact on the
practices of smaller companies as well.

 Hewlett-Packard & Microsoft: now have well established sustainability objectives

and action plans, but who also work with their very numerous suppliers to lower
their environmental impact, for instance GHG emissions.
Given their influence on many suppliers, this may result in significant changes
well beyond the two companies’ own activities.
 Green Washing: Many such efforts have often been characterized as green
washing, that is, the use of marketing gimmicks to deceptively promote a
perception that a company is putting serious efforts with regards to sustainability
without actually doing it.
However, more recently, given the growing popularity of sustainability concerns
around the world, some corporations are betting that customers actually prefer
products that come out of a greener production chain, or that come from a
corporation that values sustainability and that puts in place concrete measures to
improve its practices with this regard.

Conclusion: Looking at this broad variety of arrangements, a few observations can be made:
- There is a lot going on, including outside of state-level agreements.
- The focus on government agreements is often important, since only those
can be constraining with democratic oversight.
- Several strengths and weaknesses to each of these categories in terms of
making progress in resolving sustainability issues, as these present a long
list of challenges.

Lesson 3.2: Challenges in Global Governance

Because international or global arrangements involve participation from actors in various parts
of the world, several challenges arise that make the design and implementation of these
arrangements difficult.
We will study three of those:
- The impact of the domination of State sovereignty as a core principle of
the international state system.
 - The elimination of free riding, and ways to ensure the effective
enforcement of the agreement.
- The implementation of the concept of common but differentiated
responsibility.

State Sovereignty in the IR System: The modern international political, economic, and legal
system largely rests upon the core principle of state sovereignty, which means that each state
has exclusive sovereignty over its territory. State sovereignty implies a permanent population, a
defined territory, and one government.
The United Nations Charter, notable, states that nothing should authorize intervention in
matters essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of any state.
This can be partly traced back to the Peace of Westphalia, a series of treaties among European
powers brokered in 1648, and that eventually gave rise to the norm that we still use today
regarding what constitutes legitimate political authority in the international community.
The result of the application of this principle in international relations is that with only very few
extreme exceptions (a state government committing genocide on a part of its population, for
instance), states cannot be forced to govern in any way, even if all other countries in the world
wanted it.
Therefore, the only way that states can lead others into a certain policy direction, for instance
more stringent environmental regulations or more serious efforts to curb greenhouse gas
emissions, is through treaties that dictate certain rules of behaviour. For instance, an
international treaty where members collectively decide to put in place measures in each of their
territory to ensure the protection of biodiversity.
Therefore, any international governance arrangement must respect this principle and establish
clear rules that all signatories agree on. Otherwise, an individual state will just not sign or
participate.
The implications of this principle go further:
1. If treaties are the only way to ensure that states can convince others to follow certain
rules, then there is a strong incentive for states not to participate in any arrangement
where they agree to cede part of their sovereignty to the arrangement’s body, because
of the fear that if the new rule in the future with which a given state is in strong
disagreement, it would be forced to follow it or face penalties. As a result, states will
prefer not to participate in any arrangement that is seen as too restrictive, to preserve
their sovereignty, even if they agree in principle on the objectives of the arrangement.
2. This also implies that negotiations over the design of a treaty (for environmental matters
or otherwise) involve bargaining over how to reassure future signatories that their
participation will provide them with more benefits than drawbacks, including compared
to other countries (regardless of whether these are participants or not). Notably, in
some cases the elaboration of an arrangement to improve a sustainability issue may
involve costs.
As a result of all of this, many governments see treaties with other nations as risky or desirable
only in extreme circumstances, where benefits can be clearly demonstrated, and costs are
shared in a way that is fair to all.
This is quite a burden for efforts to establish and implement international arrangements, and
acts as a serious barrier to any effective arrangement, even when it is deemed necessary.

Free Riding and Enforcement Issues: The purpose of international agreements is to make sure
that all signatories respect the rules agreed upon.
Therefore, the issue of compliance is key: how do you make rules to enforce compliance among
members, when states can choose to defect or not participate altogether is they perceive this
threat to be too strong?
The problem of compliance has two components:
1. Designing rules so that free riding is made less likely.
2. Ensuring that compliance is the norm.
Free riding refers to the fact that if an issue has a global negative impact, and if a coordinated
effort takes place to globally reduce the impact, then all participants have the incentive to bear
as little of the cost as possible.
The free rider is a collective action problem: all participants in the agreement know that their
concerted action will reduce the global impact, and therefore they will benefit from this
concerted action. However, they could be tempted to not make any effort on their own, since
there is a cost to that action, and the action of all other actors will produce a partially beneficial
impact anyway.
To do this, the agreement must be designed in a way that ensures that the cost of non-
compliance is seen as acceptable and reasonable to participants but is also too high to make
non-compliance attractive.
In other words, everyone agrees with the rules, and with the penalties associated with not
respecting them.
In practice this is difficult:
- Finding the exact sweet spot between too stringent (which results in no
one wanting to sign and participate in the agreement) and not enough
(which results in the agreement having no teeth and being ineffective) is
extremely difficult both technically and politically.
 - Designing mechanisms to enforce compliance requires the creation of a
body within the treaty that assesses compliance, and that applies the
penalties.
For instance, the body would need to be able to detect fraud (for
instance, if a country is falsely reporting measures that it’s not really
taking), which requires both a significant staff and the technical means to
assess progress.
For these reasons, the effectiveness of arrangements to improve sustainability problems that
involve several countries has the added difficulty of needing to be designed to deal with the
issues of free riding and compliance.

Common but Differentiated Responsibility: Just like for anything related to sustainability,
dealing, politically, with the concept of time is immensely difficult: what if an environmental
harm today is the result of years of neglect? If its five years, probably this doesn’t matter much,
but what if its 50 years of accumulated environmental externalities? The notion of culprits and
responsibility complicate efforts already made difficult by the other two challenges presented
earlier.
Particularly for issues global in scope, for some time now, states have recognized the necessity
of applying the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities. Since many global
sustainability issues require actions that may be costly or socially difficult to take, the
responsibility of the issue can always be discussed in complex terms: determining whose fault it
is can be complicated, at least politically. Nevertheless, there are general trends underlying
basic agreement on the concept itself.
1. Most sustainability issues are traced at some level to consumption, production, and
trade of goods and services of various kinds around the world.
2. Over the past centuries, now-industrialized countries have been responsible for an
overwhelming majority of these activities.
3. Discussions over the common but differentiated responsibility concept normally involves
agreement that industrialized countries should bear the lion’s share of putting in place
efforts necessary now, whether they involve cleaning up the oceans, reducing
greenhouse gas emissions, or drastically improving waste management.
In addition to this, developing countries have much smaller means to do something about these
issues, while industrialized countries possess vastly superior resources to do something about it,
including higher income and wealth, more effective and professionalized agencies and
institutions, and technological knowhow.
As a result, states present at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992 formalized the concept
in the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, of UNFCCC. Although this was
mostly in the context of early discussions over the issue of climate change, the principle came to
be used more generally to discuss sustainability arrangements. Adoption in Rio was based on
this general understanding that indeed, it efforts at coordinating international action to improve
sustainability was to be just and fair among populations of the world, it should involve these
two general aspects.
The result is a reflection, necessarily contested, about how to concretely find an arrangement
that all parties want to get in and respect (linking back to the sovereignty principle). Otherwise,
they walk away.
This brings us to the difficulties of putting such a general principle in practice:
1. Measuring precisely the difference in historical responsibility is complex: how should the
burden be divided exactly?
- Should it be based on GDP growth for the past 100 years?
- If so, why not 75 or 90 years instead?
- Should it be instead about the more precise actions recognized to have
had an impact on the sustainability crisis at hand, like specific types of
emissions or pollutants?
2. What about the compensation mechanism? Even if we had a precise formula to divide
the differentiation governance arrangement implement on compensation as a result?
- Should the countries with a higher responsibility invest a higher
percentage of all funds dedicated to dealing with the problem?
- Should the compensation be about the measures required, with more
aggressive measures taken by countries with a higher responsibility?
- Or perhaps the timeline to implement them should be different, giving for
instance a longer period to low-income countries to comply with the new
measures decided in the agreement?
There is rarely one “right” choice to these questions, what we have instead are many options
that must be discussed and negotiated.
Countries that risk getting more penalized than others depending on which choice is made will
argue accordingly, with the ever-present threat of walking away and not participating in the
agreement at all.
This is a key problem, of course, if indeed they are the ones where most of the changes must
occur (or if historical responsibility is to be taken seriously at all in the arrangement).

Conclusion:
 Mainly due to the problems covered above, the design and implementation of
effective arrangements is made more difficult by their international aspect.
 Worse still, this design and implementation doesn’t diminish the task of
designing an effective approach to the problem that we discussed in other
lessons: actors must also figure out what tools should be used, to what extent
governments should be involved, the resources necessary to ensure the effective
enforcement of the arrangement, and so on.
 Nevertheless, global and international governance arrangements are often made
necessary due to the scope of sustainability problems.

Lesson 3.3: Case Study: The Protection of s

The protection of biological diversity represents a sustainability challenge with a global scope,
and efforts to coordinate action and encourage it have developed over a long period of time,
from early political organization of conservationist groups in the early 20 th century pushing for
legislation to protect some areas and eventually species, to the more global action since the
creation of the United Nations Environment Programme in the early 1970s.
The evolution of these efforts have notably produced the Convention on Biological Diversity,
signed in 1992 and updated several times since.
So the protection of biodiversity represents one of these sustainability challenges with a global
reach, but which raises different concerns given that the diversity is not uniformly distributed
over the globe, and that not all countries consider the benefits of biodiversity on equal footing.

 Problem Definition and Formal Agenda:

Biological diversity, or biodiversity is a measure of the variety of life on Earth, at the
genetic, species, or ecosystem levels. In environmental politics, biodiversity is often
treated as a health issue in addition to a sustainability one, as biodiversity provides four
types of ecosystem services to humans:
1. Provision services (food, water, timber)
2. Regulating services (wetland water filtration, forest air purification)
3. Cultural services (recreation, spiritual fulfillment)
4. Supporting services (photosynthesis, nutrient cycling, soil formation)
The link between biodiversity and sustainability is through the fact that these services
ensure both a quality-of-life and a survival aspect: put simply, too significant a loss to
biodiversity leaves future generations unable to obtain the same services, some of which
are essential for survival, and others of which are necessary to maintain a high quality of
life.
Now, human populations have an impact on biodiversity loss at a rate never seen before.
The United Nations Environment Programme defines various categories of threats to
biodiversity.
- Habitat destruction: has played a key role in extinctions, especially in
relation to tropical forest destruction. Overconsumption, overpopulation,
land use change, deforestation and pollution resulting from human
activity all contribute to habitat destruction.
- Introduced and invasive alien species: the introduction of exotic species
that replace local and native species often result in the extinction of
native species. Normally, barriers such as large rivers, seas, oceans,
mountains and deserts encourage diversity by enabling independent
evolution on either side of the barrier, and the term invasive species
refers to ones that breach these barriers.
- Global climate change: is also considered to be a major potential threat
to global biodiversity, and the changes in the climate are too rapid for
some species to adapt. EG: Coral reefs – which are biodiversity hotspots –
may be lost within the century if global warming continues at the current
pace. Global warming also contributes to habitat destruction.
- Overexploitation: overhunting, overfishing, poor soil conservation in
agriculture and the like can quickly result in the extinction of species. The
rapid growth of human population – which is expected to reach 11 billion
 people in 2100 – leads to overexploitation, in other words, the
consumption of a resource at an unsustainable rate.
 Actors and Groups and their Positions
A long-lasting division in approaches to protecting biodiversity has divided various
arguments among conservationist and preservationist.
Conservationists highlight the importance of conserving natural resources, when these
ultimately serve the purpose of supplying humanity with sustenance.
Preservationists advocate the preservation of natural space and some species from
human exploitation, which have so far obtained much more limited success over
conservationists.
Conservationists prompted the development of international arrangements as early as
the late 1800s, focused at first on fisheries.
The further institutionalization of the conservationist efforts throughout the 20 th
century, eventually led to the creation of the World Conservation Union, a vast network
of scientific and policy experts, which publishes a Red List of thousands of endangered
species.
In parallel, the World Wide Fund for Nature was created to fund issues related to the
WCU work.
Other positions on the protection of biodiversity are defended based on various actors.
For instance, developing countries worry about their legal jurisdiction over genetic
resources (that is, local plant or animal genetic material of actual or potential value, for
instance to be transformed into marketable medicine or crops), whereas developing
countries are often concerned with the degradation of biodiversity hotspots like tropical
forests.
 Institutions, Norms, & Current Practices:
More formally, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) was created in 1972
helped streamline efforts to discuss the protection of biodiversity at a global level,
including through the building of better and more refined scientific knowledge on the
state of biodiversity, which was limited at the time.
A set of other biodiversity-related institutions culminated with the signature of the
Convention on Biological Diversity in 1992, the primary governance arrangement
designed to deal with biodiversity protection.
The CBD was adopted partly as an attempt to reconcile the divergent worries of the
developing vs. developed countries.
Developing countries were mainly concerned over ensuring and enshrining the equitable
sharing of genetic resources they held, especially to protect them from exploitation by
pharmaceutical companies in the North; the Northern countries with the notable
exception of the US agreed, as long as their demands for more explicit efforts to protect
regions particularly rich in biodiversity were met.
The CBD is largely based on the implementation of National biodiversity strategies and
action plans, respecting state sovereignty but providing a set of rules and guidelines to
apply.
 Objectives and Effectiveness of Governance Arrangement
 The key worry related to international arrangements that don’t challenge state
sovereignty at all is that in the end, they are ineffective.
States have the incentive to develop strategies that are very timid and thus least costly
while others may put in more substantial effort. In other words, the former may attempt
to free ride, and there are no penalties associated applicable to this timidity.
Moreover, the US hasn’t ratified the CBD convention, although it’s the only member not
to have done so.
Nevertheless, as of March 2018, 189 of 196 parties have developed National Biodiversity
Strategies and Action Plans as required by the convention. So, the convention has
certainly encouraged governments to construct NBSAPs.
Even the US’s reluctance is more one of disagreement with the sovereignty issue of such
an institution (however limited it may be), as its own scientists continue to contribute to
the efforts.
One caveat of course is that these reports are uneven in terms of both progress claimed
and quality of presentation. Moreover, there is no guarantee that countries are
implementing biodiversity-related policies and regulations.
Nevertheless, they are permanent and would not exist in the absence of the CBD and its
secretariat.
The effectiveness of the CBD is also the reason for one of its difficulties: it is extremely
complex, having both thematic work areas but also crosscutting issues and economic
and legal matters to reconcile and work with.
The democratic legitimacy of the convention has also improved with a significant
increase in participation of Indigenous and non-governmental groups.
Despite this very real progress led by the existence of the CBD and surrounding
institutional efforts, the pace of habitat destruction is just too rapid for biodiversity
protection to keep up.

Lesson 3.4: Case Study: The Global Governance of Climate Change

Climate change is often considered to be the main sustainability challenge of our time, with
significant public and political attention and efforts to manage it or prevent its worst impacts,
both current and potential.
This is for better or worse, of course, as overwhelming attention to finding an effective
governance arrangement to deal with climate change has the benefit of focusing the attention
of political actors around the world, but at the same time, many sustainability problems have
little to do with climate change and may be impacted by the dominance of this agenda.
In this case study, we look at some of the elements in the immense challenge of finding
governance arrangements to prevent climate change from having negative impacts on human
population, or at least to avoid the worst possible developments of these impacts in the near
future.

 Problem Definition and Formal Agenda

What is the sustainability problem of climate change?
 In a gist, the climate change public problem refers to the impact of human activity on
creating and amplifying a global warming effect on the globe, through a greenhouse
effect.
This warming stems from the rapid augmentation in the emissions of gases contributing
to this greenhouse effect on the globe, through a greenhouse effect, which come from
various human activities, but especially those activities that have been occurring since
the beginning of massive industrialization about a century and a half ago.
The result is a shift in the Earth’s climate, small at first, but compounding over time,
leading to global warming.
What is notable, as well, is that according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change, the main international scientific body publishing reviews of climate change
science, the observed changes for the past half century are “unprecedented in the
instrumental temperature record, and in historical and paleoclimate proxy records of
climate change over thousands of millions of years.”
This accelerated global warming has various impacts on the natural environment, both
already occurring and likely to happen soon, notably:
- More frequent natural disasters and extreme weather events, for instance
hurricanes and heat waves, which also are more likely to be stronger on
average.
- A rise in sea levels, largely the result of melting glaciers and sea ice,
sufficient in some cases to make inhabited islands or coastal cities
submerged.
- A loss in biodiversity both on land and in oceans.
The results in impacts on human populations:
- More frequent and important migration movements of climate refugees,
that is, people affected by the warming’s effect on some regions’ water
and agricultural resources, or following from the increased and stronger
natural disasters, or relocalisation due to rising sea levels.
- Investment needed to deal with disasters.
- Food insecurity from decreasing crop yields.
Finally, global warming has the added difficulty of the inertia due to the greenhouse
gasses staying in the atmosphere for a very long time, and therefore is difficult to
reverse.
The public problem of climate change is thus understood as comprising two dimensions:
1. Reducing greenhouse gas emissions significantly and rapidly enough to attenuate
climate change and prevent the worst possibilities.
2. Dealing with adaptation to global warming’s impacts today and in the near future, to
mitigate its impacts.
 Actors, and Groups and their Positions
A large plethora of actors participate in debates over what to do to tackle the problem of
global warming, and space lacks here to do justice how all these actors and their
positions have evolved over time.
Nevertheless, we can identify a few key constituencies, some of which overlap, in
discussions over action to prevent or temper climate change.
1. States: climate change has long been recognized as a problem requiring global
action. Every negotiation or call for action regarding climate change since the late
1980s has involved a significant number of states, with of course differing positions
regarding what should be done, or oven on the definition and importance of the
problem.
Mainly these positions relate to the national interest of states, which differ
depending on:
- How the state is threatened by the impact of global warming. For
instance, island states are particularly vulnerable to major impacts on
their populations and have even joined in an alliance in climate change
negotiations.
States with other vulnerabilities heightened by global warming, for
instance ones which are more prone to extreme weather events and
expansion of deserts, also may be more worried and may push for more
action than states that will be affected less, even though all states are
affected.
- How the state weighs the cost of action for its own population. The
solution to mitigating global warming, independently of the governance
arrangement to help put it in place, requires a change in human activities
so that much fewer greenhouse gasses are emitted.
Not all states have developed their societies similarly over the past hundreds of
years, however: some have a much more important carbon footprint, which is to say
the overall emissions of their activities per inhabitant, than others, due to many
choices made over times, for instance electricity that is produced by greenhouse gas
emitting coal or natural gas burning (vs. hydroelectricity, nuclear energy or
renewables), an industrial sector comprising more heavy industries, which often emit
more GHGs, a geography and transport system requiring long distances to be
travelled by truck and individual cars, and so on.
Therefore, the cost implied by a country wanting to reduce its emissions will vary
greatly, and some countries may find it much more difficult (that is, costly) to reduce
their emissions: for instance, if a country’s economy is largely dependent on mining
fossil fuels like oil and gas, then reducing its emissions requires decreasing these
activities significantly, which inevitably leads to job losses unless the economy is
reorganized, which may be difficult in the short term.
2. Businesses: like states, the business sector is divided over the issue of climate
change.
Some industrial actors, notably, have long been deploying major efforts to prevent
action on climate change, given their interests, for instance, oil and coal companies
stand to lose a lot from being required by states to decrease their activities, or from
the decreased demand for their products as populations around the world change
the way they pursue certain activities.
EG: if many people massively switch their mode of personal transport from a
gasoline-powered car to an electric car or public transit, then demand for gasoline-
 powered cars goes down. On the other hand, electric carmakers may see this change
positively, and so will electric utilities, including renewables electricity developers.
This example illustrates that it is impossible to group the business or even the
industry sector into one coherent position on climate change action: just like for
many other things, there are potential winners and losers of any major change in the
organization of human activities in the business sector, and to a certain extent
positions are developed accordingly. Oil, coal, gasoline-powered carmakers may
want to keep action limited, whereas wind turbine developers, electric car makers,
and energy efficiency consultants helping people and companies reduce their energy
consumption may be favourable to more aggressive action.
A closer look, however, reveals that even this distinction is misleading: businesses
evolve, and diversify as they try to improve their flexibility in the face of changing
market conditions, be they related to climate change or anything else.
As a result, even oil companies like Shell and BP now have significant divisions that
work in the renewable energy sector, and some longstanding carmakers like Toyota
have been developing an electric car division for quite some time.
3. NGOs: Environmental NGOs have for the most part been early lobbyists for action to
slow down or avoid climate change. Perhaps more importantly, over time many
groups have benefitted from more openness in international negotiations on climate
change action to participation from non-state groups.
As a result, the positions of many NGOs are now heard in a streamlined fashion at
climate change meetings every year.
The list could go on, and each of the very broad categories above could be refined into
much more detailed descriptions.
Nevertheless, this brief overview is useful to analyzing governance challenges to
effective coordinated action on climate change, as this part of the framework serves to
highlight, first, that an immense number of groups and people participate in the process
of coordinating action on a global sustainability issue like climate change, and second,
that some of these groups and states argue that effective action requires commitments
from states. Given that these states have very different takes on how to deal with the
issue, negotiations are contentious, and efforts so far have been largely insufficient to be
effective at curbing emissions.
If we focus on state-led efforts to establish a formal international agreement fostering
action on climate change, the Paris Agreement signed in 2015 uses the concept of
National Determined Contributions, a process by which each country establishes a 5-
year target for its contribution to reducing GHG emissions.
The Agreement requires that NDCs should be “ambitious”, “represent a progression over
time”, and be reported and improved upon every 5 years to the United Nations
Framework Convention on Climate Change, which oversees the negotiation process and
the implementation of the agreement.
This is the way through which State sovereignty is factored onto the Paris agreement
through the NDCs, as there is no enforcement mechanism if a country fails to meet its
target other than the reputational impact of reporting it as such to all other participants.
 Institutions, Norms, & Current Practices
To a large extent, the formal process to push for international coordinated action on
climate change was established through the creation of the United Nations Framework
Convention on Climate Change in 1992, with the explicit objective of stabilizing GHG
emissions at a level that would prevent irreversible human interference with the climate.
One of the main outputs from the convention was a set of formal collaboration for
political action on climate change, mainly through annual Conferences of the Parties
(COPs), held every year since 1995. At these meeting, all parties to the convention meet
to discuss action on climate change, and to elaborate agreements or other governance
arrangements to attain the objectives of the UNFCCC, like the Kyoto Protocol in 1997 or
the Paris Agreement in 2015.
Importantly, the UNFCCC also tasks member countries with establishing standardized
national inventories of greenhouse gas emissions, which helps assemble valuable data
on measuring both the contribution of each country to global emissions, as well as their
evolution over time.
Standardized categories are established to distinguish various sources for these
emissions, for instance oil-based transport, electricity production, heating and cooling
for buildings, or waste and forest management.
Measuring greenhouse gases refers more specifically to the estimating of these
emissions, since it is almost impossible to truly measure every single source of emissions
in any given country. Think about what this would imply: measurement devices would
need to be somehow attached to every source of emission, operated by every single
individual, in buildings, plants, transport vehicles, etc. Although technically feasible, this
direct measurement would require incommensurable and very costly efforts.
Consequently, estimations are used instead, through processes shared across countries
to ensure that measurements are comparable.
Estimating GHGs is essential to the negotiation process for effective governance
arrangements, because it provides the necessary data to meet any component of
agreements: establishing each participant’s contribution to the problem, tracking
progress both globally and on an individual country basis, showing the extent of the
challenge and the difficulties facing efforts to transform certain sources of emissions
more specifically, etc.
In parallel with the UNFCCC, another organization has had a very important role since
1988 in efforts to manage the climate change problem: the Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change (IPCC).
The IPCC was created to provide the world with an objective and scientific view on
climate change, to inform action.
It publishes reports every few years that summarize and assess the current state of
scientific knowledge on the issue, as well as summaries for policymakers, which distill
the essential implications for the current scientific consensus. The assessment of the
scientific literature by the IPCC also covers options to mitigate or adapt to the impacts of
climate change.
The issues discussed in negotiations over what to do to combat climate change, the
concept of common but differentiated responsibility was established as a norm on how
to design any meaningful coordinated action.
 The UNFCCC mentions that developed countries, having a much larger historical
responsibility for the problem and much more significant resources to do something
about it should take the lead in efforts to address climate change, specifically stating that
the effectiveness of global efforts depended first and foremost on these countries.
Moreover, the convention also explicitly links the issues of sustainable development and
climate change, stating that taking fully into account economic and social development
and poverty eradication in developing countries is essential in designing arrangements
to deal with climate change, drawing a clear link with the definition of sustainable
development prevailing at the time.
The work of various actors, including the IPCC, and the negotiation process done under
the UNFCCC has contributed to creating a norm over climate change action: contrary to
what prevailed in the 1990s, at the creation of both these institutions, there is now a
broad consensus both on the extent and threats of climate change and on the necessity
to act quickly and substantially in reducing emissions around the world.
When the UNFCCC was created in 1992, there was no recognized or formal process to
foster discussions over what to do about climate change, little discussion over the most
effective means to deal with the problem, let alone a formal agenda to design
governance arrangements that would collectivize efforts on a global scale.
At the signature of the Paris Agreement in 2015, by contrast, these issues has
significantly progressed despite how insufficient efforts may be at this point.
 Objectives and Effectiveness of Governance Arrangement
Given the multiple dimensions of the climate change problem, its links with
development and poverty, and the uneven responsibilities and means across states,
evaluating the effectiveness of global governance arrangements so far is a challenge.
Despite the significant progress in establishing an institutional regime to make a global
arrangement to deal with climate change possible, most actors agree today that the
results so far have been largely insufficient. Interestingly, despite the immense
complexity of a global and far-reaching sustainability issue like climate change, there is
at least one overarching criteria to evaluate the effectiveness of efforts so far: have
global emissions diminished significantly? No.
Since 1990, global emissions have continuously increased, and the same is true for the
years following the signature of the Paris Agreement, although we are still early in its
implementation.
If we look more specifically at major emitters, China’s emissions have risen by over 300%
over the same period, while the US’s emission went up as well.
Although the EU has achieved some success in reducing emissions, the reductions have
stagnated over the past few years.

Although the evolution of emissions is by far the main criteria to be used in establishing
the effectiveness of efforts, other criteria can also be used to look at the impact of these
arrangements and the political norms surrounding climate change:
1. The climate change framework: the normalization of the problem, and by extension
the importance of sustainability, have participated in creating a shift in culture
 around many regions of the world by raising awareness for sustainability at large,
and carbon footprints.
This penetrates many other sustainability issues, which are often interpreted
through the climate change framework:
What emissions do I cause when I travel by car or plane, the emissions necessary to
the production and distribution of the stuff I buy and use, or the impact of cutting
rainforests on global warming. Although this can be seen as a largely positive
development, there are some that argue that this shift is occurring too slowly to
have the quick impact required by the problem.
As a result, “effectiveness” should, here again, be considered to be very low.
2. Common but differentiated responsibility: has the process led to a successful
implementation of the common but differentiated responsibility? Yes and no.
The Paris Agreement, for instance, does call for a contribution of $100 billion a year
by developed countries to be transferred to developing countries for climate change
mitigation and adaptation efforts.
So far this has not materialized (at least not fully), and there is still disagreement
over how to spend the funds effectively and fairly.
Nevertheless, this has been one of the main topics of discussion at annual meetings
since 2015.
3. NDCs and participation from reluctant states: has the process led to action by
reluctant states and actors?
- The previous global agreement on climate change, since 1997, was the
Kyoto Protocol. The agreement was criticized for many things, but, it
wasn’t ratified by the US, the world’s largest emitter at the time, and
didn’t contain any binding targets for rapidly rising large emitters like
China and India.
- By contrast, the Paris Agreement attempted to resolve this issue by
allowing countries to come up on their own with Nationally Determined
Contributions intended to provide the flexibility to ensure participation
from all major countries around the world.
This puts state sovereignty at the center of the principles underlying the agreement.
However, there is no mechanism to judge or enforce that NDCs are “sufficient”, and
countries don’t face penalties if they fail to meet the targets they put forward.
The only mechanism is informal name-and-shame, meaning that countries are
motivated to put in efforts to keep their reputation on the international scene.
Although this could also be seen as an incentive to put forward very timid NDCs, so
that they are at least met, such a strategy would also be detected and shamed by
other participants. Therefore, although compliance isn’t enforced through a “sticks”
approach or any sanctions mechanism, the hope is that the seriousness of the
problem documented by the evidence gathered by the IPCC, will be enough to
guarantee that countries all put in their fair share of the effort required globally.
4. Overall stringency of the Paris Agreement: needless to say, this isn’t an approach
that everyone is happy with.
 To many, the urgency and magnitude of the problem requires much more definitive
commitments, and this isn’t what the Paris Agreement is providing.
To others, however, this is the only way to have an effective arrangement in a world
where state sovereignty prevails.
The signature of the imperfect but long-awaited Paris Agreement was received with
careful praise, but the decision by the US to pull out of the agreement in 2017 raised
concerns of a Kyoto-era repeat. Indeed, the non-participation of the US would be a
blow to the potential effectiveness of the agreement over the medium term, but for
the moment, other participants don’t seem to back down from their efforts due to
free riding concerns related to the US.
Even middle income and fast rising countries like China and India, which have
become essential to these efforts, have so far renewed their commitment in the face
of the US backing down, as they now see the opportunity of using the climate
change framework to foster and accelerate what many call a sustainability transition,
referring to the broad scale transformation of modern societies toward more
sustainable practices, including the economic opportunities awaiting leaders in the
various dimensions of this transition, notably renewable energy technology
manufacturing, cost effective recycling technologies, and so on.
Perhaps this is the main success of the efforts to broker global governance
arrangements: it did convince many actors around the world, including many
citizens, businesses, and states, that the climate change issue represented a catalyzer
to think about a global transformation of human organization, especially economic
organization, into more sustainable activities, and that there were many economic
opportunities in there as well.
Citizens become more interested in reducing their carbon footprints, which leads
businesses that offer products and processes paying particular attention to this to
burgeon, and states see the opportunities in the reorganization of their economies
toward these sectors. We touch on many such opportunities in other sections of this
course.

Lesson 4: Development and Sustainability

Lesson 4.1: Structural Sustainability Challenges in Development and Economic Growth

Development is a generic term, whose meaning can vary depending on the situation or on who
you ask. In a general sense, it refers to the process through which desirable social change is
achieved by societies.

There are several more specific takes on assessing and discussing the best ways for this change
to occur and be fostered, variously including concerns of justice and equality, technological
innovation, institutional organization, and democratization and the spreading of political and
social liberty, to name a few.
What we will focus on in this lesson is the economic growth paradigm which has led societies
around the world, although to wildly varying degrees, to attempt to modernize and improve
their standards of living.

This view of substituting economic growth for political and social development was a dominant
shortcut for a long time in development thinking, as most high-level actors concerned with
studying or making policy fostering development focused mostly on economic development.
This was not merely out of narrow mindedness: many of these actors were concerned with
measuring progress and the effectiveness of policies designed to accelerate or foster
development, and as a result the material capabilities implied by economic growth provided
with a good approximation of societies’ improvements in standards of living (or lack thereof). In
other words, there was a certain practical aspect to narrowing down the definition of
development to its economic growth version, which allows for an easier understanding of its
evolution over time.

Introduction to Development and Sustainability:

A while ago, however, many authors pointed out that this was problematic for policy design:
 Problematic for Policy Design: striving for economic growth as an always positive thing
led to the neglect of other important factors like income inequality, political repression,
or sustainability.
 Typical Answers to Critics: answers to these critics succeeded for a long time in pointing
out that targeting economic growth would still trickle down positively for all these other
issues, and that therefore diverting attention away from the growth objectives could be
counterproductive.
 Eventually: eventually however, especially starting in the 1970s, development thinking
grew much more skeptical of the growth-only approaches and started integrating other
notions into development thinking and policy making.
Development theory and development policy are beyond the scope of this course, but this gives
us an introduction into the political workings of governance efforts to raise standards of livings
of populations around the globe. What we can take from this to inform our discussion is that
this evolution in thinking led to the growing popularity of the sustainable development concept,
including its coining in the Our Common Future report, discussed in a previous lesson:
“Development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future
generations to meet their own needs” – Our Common Future

The definition at least implies that there are various kinds of development, and that a subset
may be considered sustainable.

But it also implies that most development as we have known it so far in human history has not
been meeting the terms of this definition of sustainability.

So far, there have been many tensions between economic development as it has proceeded in
recent decades alongside the rapid population growth and sustainability concerns.
Structural Features of the Economic Growth Paradigm:
So why has development created sustainability challenges?
While there are various complex reasons explaining the tensions arising from development as it
has proceeded thus far and sustainability, it is possible to do a rapid overview of the key
arguments.

Most of these arguments come from the fact that under a model where development, in the
form of rising standards of living for populations, is associated with economic growth, certain
patterns emerged that represent structural features of this modernization.

These structural features, in turn, each create a host of sustainability challenges, and are
difficult to transform. In the following, we will discuss three such mechanisms:
1. The principle of accumulation and consumption: the current development model is
largely based on economic growth resulting in higher standards of living, which implies
that growth is mostly good (if it isn’t too rapid or too unstable).

So, the overarching incentive for all actors in this model is to ensure the continuous
growth in economies around the world, which results in more wealth, spread out
(however unevenly) among populations.

In terms of sustainability. This proses a fundamental problem:

 Most sustainability issues come from human activity, and particularly the use of
transformed resources to satisfy various needs.
 Therefore, in general, the more consumption there is, the more production there
is to meet this demand (economic growth implies more human activity).
Production requires installations, infrastructure, raw materials, and the use of energy
resources to transform natural resources into usable products that meet certain needs.
It also requires the packaging of these goods, the burning of fuel for transporting them
to retail stores, and so on.
Consumption of these goods leads to waste. In addition to any other resources required
for enjoying the service provided by the good. For instance, gasoline to make a car move
around.

There is, as a result, a long list of environmental harms coming from large scale
production and consumption, including air and water pollution, smog, greenhouse gas
emissions, loss of biodiversity, soil erosion from industrial agriculture, etc. But even
worse, given that growth in these activities is the basis for the entire development
enterprise (including lifting people out of poverty and ensuring the provision of social
services like health), these harms increase alongside the increase in production and
consumption.
In other words, economic growth not only creates sustainability problems, but since it is
something to encourage in this development paradigm, there is a bias in societies’
development efforts towards creating and amplifying unsustainable practices.
2. The impact of growth on resource depletion, and the disincentives for conservation
and recycling: a second argument explaining why development has created
sustainability challenges related to the impact of economic activity on resource
depletion, and the disincentive for conservation and recycling that has prevailed so far.

As implied by the first factor earlier, more economic growth leads to more
environmental impacts, and part of this quite simply has to do with an overuse of
natural resources available.

Some of these are non-renewable, which means that economic activity leads to a
depletion of the resources available. In other words, our use of many resources is
unsustainable.

Beyond the issue of waste management, the real question is why we have not been
putting more effort into recycling and re-use. After all, the recycling motto of reducing,
re-using, and recycling seems to make a lot of sense even from an economic standpoint,
as these three actions would seem to point to a lower cost for raw materials.

However, there are two problems with this statement:

I. To maximize economic growth, you need to minimize production costs, so that
more people can buy more goods.

In doing so, we face a choice:

Either we recycle old materials to use as an input to our production process, or

we use more raw materials extracted from the natural environment,

It turns out that recycling is very often more costly than extracting new
resources, which means that firms see a disincentive to favour recycling to
replace their impact on resource depletion. This goes beyond the mere
additional costs of recycling: in many cases recycling is more expensive because
products are not designed to be easily recycled, as this normally involves a higher
production cost.

This leads a vicious circle of higher cost recycling caused by lack of incentive to
make it less costly.

II. The more functional problem with the statement that reduce, re-use, and recycle
makes sense in the current economic model is that reducing, in the absolute, is
not encouraged.

What is encouraged, instead, is more production and consumption.

 So, while it is true that production that manages to meet a need with a drastically
reduced consumption of raw materials is likely to gain an advantage, this only
results in more consumption overall, as the lower prices for the resulting
products lead to an increase in their consumption, so overall there is still an
increase in resource depletion.

3. The role of trade and globalisation of production chains: finally, a third mechanism
through which the dominant economic growth model has resulted in structural
increases in sustainability challenges is through international trade.

The past 50 years have seen a spectacular expansion in trade and other types of
economic and social integration among the countries of the world, from increased
exchanges in goods and services to information sharing and online social networking,
more travelling both by individuals and for business purposes, and increased cultural
exchanges among various nations.

This process has been fed by a host of factors, including rapid population growth, but
also, most notably, the rapid rise in standards of living of some populations around the
world, the advent of transformative technologies like the internet and satellites, and the
decrease in cost of many services and technologies from crops to planes.

This is the main reason why this evolution is often termed the globalization era, referring
to the increased interconnectedness of various types among populations of the world.

The economic and trade dimension of this process is perhaps the clearest and easiest to
demonstrate, for instance:
 Trade in goods and services among countries has increased 2.5-fold.
 Passenger and freight air transport has increased by a factor of 10 in terms of the
passengers and cargo transported.
 Financial investments from industrialized countries into developing countries
went up from almost nothing to $600 billion/year, although this has mostly gone
to the middle-income countries.
This has led observers to think about whether this increased interconnectedness,
economic, has had impacts on the sustainability of human practices in general.

Overall, three aspects led to worries over this impact (arguments regarding the impacts
on sustainability):
I. More trade leads to more consumption: the increased economic integration
among countries and regions of the world implies a lowering of the overall costs
of goods and services.

As the economic rationale for free trade goes, trade occurs because firms and
consumers find it in their advantage to do so, which means a better optimization
of economic processes in many sectors.
 Ultimately, this leads to lower costs for many products and services, compared
with the same products in a world with less trade.

But an overall lowering of the cost of various products and services implies an
increase in the purchasing power of people around the world, which leads to
more consumption, and by extension, more production (since demand has gone
up).

Since most consumption and production is not done sustainably, this results in an
additional strain on the earth’s resources.

II. More trade leads to more resources used to move stuff around: to reach markets
around the world, products need to travel more, and so do consultants selling
services.

This results in an environmental harm through the burning of fuel for transport,
as well as the building of the vehicles and infrastructure required to move the
goods around.

III. Less trade barriers lead countries to compete for investment, potentially creating
a race to the bottom in terms of environmental regulations, as countries
compete to make it easiest for multinationals to invest on their territory.

Since environmental regulations usually have a cost, investors may choose countries
with the laxest environmental standards, creating an incentive for all countries to do the
same.

So, what this brief overview of three important mechanisms linking economic growth to
sustainability challenges tells us in many of the problems that we face today are the direct result
of how these activities have been structured over time.

In fact, this is one of the very reasons why governance arrangements are necessary: since many
of the links overviewed above are structural, it means that they cannot be changed without a
significant and coordinated effort by many actors to transform this structure, whether it be
related to climate change, the loss in biodiversity, or the management of forests.

The SDG Global Agenda:

The popularity of the sustainable development definition has not prevented it from evolving
since 1987, and this has occurred alongside an evolution in development policy as well.

In 2015, notably, the UN launched the Sustainable Development Goals global agenda, the
follow-up global governance effort to the Millennium Goals Agenda that covered the period
from 2000 to 2015.
The SDG agenda is for 2015 to 2030 and aims to achieve a total of 17 targets. While it is focused
on improving the living conditions of the world’s poorest, it also represents a tentative answer
to concerns of overconsumption and development for the entire world population, as
unfettered economic growth in developing countries, which represent the vast majority of the
world population, raises the issue of how to rapidly and drastically improve the sustainability of
human practices as well.

The SDGs present a good overview of the evolving understanding and recognition that
sustainability penetrates any effort to improve the human condition. As a result, it is useful to
look at the goals and what their posited link with development is.

Let’s look at goals 1 and 7.

The mechanisms through which the current economic growth paradigm results in sustainability
challenges are significant and, in many cases, structural, so they require a rethinking of how
human prosperity, or more specially, progress in standards of living is achieved, and of what
higher standards of living mean.

The SDG agenda gives us a glimpse at current thinking on this issue in the international
community. It is a very loose governance arrangement, with virtually zero level of constrain.

It is merely a blueprint to share information and resources and organize the various efforts to
reach the goals agreed upon, which were the result of an impressively massive consultation
process among a very large quantity of stakeholders around the world.

It does however help up see what needs improvement for sustainability principles to be
implemented in any meaningful way.
But while a global effort like the SDGs, which tries to address comprehensively the issues of
sustainability and development, is welcome and useful in expanding the policy discussion, it is
insufficient to resolve all the tensions found in dominant economic models explained in the
earlier slides. For this, alternative models must be discussed.

Lesson 4.2: Alternative Paradigms of Economic Development

To address the many characteristics that make economic development result in a plethora of
environmental harm, several schools of thought have developed ideas on how to reorganize
societies so that people’s needs are met in a more sustainable way.

Three such ideas are covered in this lesson:

1. Life-cycle thinking
2. The circular economy
3. Degrowth
Each of these sets of ideas represent a contribution to the debate over how exactly to proceed
with transforming the economic system into one that internalizes environmental eternities, in
other words that reduces, and if possible, eliminate, the impacts of these activities on the
planet, while still ensuring a high standard of living for populations around the world.

Life-Cycle Thinking:
Life-cycle thinking is an attempt to evaluate the environmental impacts of the consumption of
certain products or to engage in certain activities from a more holistic perspective.

The general approach emerged to structure and standardized this kind of evaluations, and
normally involves the consideration of 5 life cycle “stages”:
1. Resource acquisition: which involves the extraction of raw materials and transformation.
2. Production activities: for instance, manufacturing, assembly, and packaging.
3. Distribution: including the storage of products in warehouses, their transport to
distribution centers or retail stores.
4. Use: in other words, the actual consumption of the product, but also its maintenance
and repair over its lifetime.
5. End-of-life: including any activity involved in the recycling of the product or the
management of the waste it creates when its life is over.
Therefore, the underlying idea of life-cycle thinking is to make people more aware of the
complex impact of certain consumption or activities on the environment.

Life-cycle thinking is often accompanied by the main tool used to apply it: life-cycle assessment.
Life-cycle assessment involves an evaluation of chosen impact of interest through the life-circle
of a product. For instance, if I choose to buy and use a laptop computer, there are various
activities involved with making my use of the computer possible, in each of the five stages.

Doing such an assessment also involves a choice over which environmental harm to focus on:
GHG emissions, NO2 emissions, water pollutants, water use, land use degradation, resource
depletion, can all be use as the harm to emphasize.

Once this choice is made, the next step requires the collection of an inventory for all stages of
the life-cycle, which involves estimates regarding the chosen environmental harms, for all
activities necessary to the production and consumption of the computer over its lifespan, in
addition to the end-of-life operations.

(4. Use)
Let’s take the example of the computer. When considering the environmental impact of using
(i.e., consuming) that product, we may focus mostly on the electricity used to power it. This is
indeed part of the assessment, especially because electricity can come from different sources
with very different impacts on the environment: coal-fired electricity for instance, emits
greenhouse gasses contributing to global warming, as well as air particles creating smog in
urban centers.
On the other hand, if the electricity is generated from hydroelectricity or solar panels, the
impact is much less.

But to complete the inventory, we must assess the other stages of the life cycle as well.

We have already covered the impact of the use of the product, which in this case mostly relate
to the electricity consumed for the computer to operate.

We could also consider the typical odds that the computer will be repaired at some point, be it
just to change the battery after a few years.

So, the recycling impact of the battery, in addition to the additional activities necessary to the
manufacturing and transport of the new battery, will need to be evaluated.

If we wanted to be thorough, we would also consider factors related to the service of the repair,
for instance energy used for heating the building where the repair center operates.

This all exists, at least in part, because of my need for a computer being met.

1. Resource acquisition: in this stage, building a computer in a manufacturing plant

requires the extraction and transformation of various materials, from aluminum for the
frame to more specialized metals for the circuit board, and the refined oil for the plastic
case.
These activities have an impact on the environment in various ways, from resource
depletion of minerals and oil to the diesel burned by the machinery used for this work.
2. Production: in this phase, the assessment must evaluate the impact of assembly and
manufacturing, as well as preparation for shipping to consumers. This involves energy
consumption in the plant (which will likely emit air pollutants and contribute to resource
depletion), in addition of the resources necessary for the packaging (trees are cut down
to provide the cardboard box, and oil is transformed into the plastic required for
protection in the shipping process).
3. Distribution: in this phase, fuel consumption for transport is likely to dominate, since the
products need to be transported from the plants to warehouses, and then to retail
centers.
4. Use: mentioned above
5. End-of-life: finally, after the consumption and use of the product, the fifth stage involves
an estimate of the impact of the product’s end-of-life, for instance the recycling activities
or the waste management that has to proceed after the product is discarded.

After this process is completed, the inventory gives us an estimate of the environmental impacts
chosen at the beginning of the life-cycle assessment. This can be used in two ways:
I. We can either consider the responsibility of a single product in terms of its impact on
the environment, for instance how much greenhouse gas is emitted throughout the
entire life-cycle of the product.
 If this information is available to consumers, it allows them to fully grasp the
complexity of the activities involved in the consumption of the good.
II. The second way of using the life-cycle assessment result is on a comparative bases,
for instance, comparing different products meeting the same needs. In this case,
regardless of the exact absolute impact on the environment, the comparison allows
the user of the product to know which one has the smallest impact, and by what
margin.

Although the life-cycle assessment can be traced back to the late 1960s, it was not before the
end of the century that significant effort to encourage its use began, notably with the creation
of the Life-Cycle Initiative, a public-private partnership under the auspices of the United Nations
Environment Programme. The LCI provides a global forum to assemble scientific information to
support decisions and policies to contribute to sustainability through the application of life-cycle
thinking.

Governments around the world have also been integrating life-cycle assessments into their
practices and encouraging and sometimes even forcing its use by private actors. This can be
done in various ways:
 Legislation and Regulation: for instance, governments can use a legislation or regulation
that requires private actors participating in tenders for government contracts (building
roads or bridges, for instance) to provide not only the cost associated with their tender,
but also the assessment of various environmental impacts from a life-cycle perspective.

In this situation, the contract giver considers not only the price, but also the life-cycle
impact on resources or pollution, in comparison with the other tenders.
 Finance Information Sharing Platforms: governments can also support platforms sharing
information on life-cycle inventories, so that it becomes easier and less costly for smaller
private actors to complete life-cycle assessments (LCAs).
 It may be possible for a large multinational to devote the resources to complete an LCA
for a given product. For instance, Apple can certainly do it for our earlier computer
example.

However, this study is still costly, so if we think about small and medium enterprises with
limited resources, it would be difficult for them to complete the same effort.

Instead, governments support the building and sharing of life cycle inventories for
standard processes and give access to all private actors so that they don’t have to bear
the cost of completing the full inventory on their own, facilitating their use of the LCA
tool.
 Leadership by Example: governments can also lead by example, by using LCA
themselves in its own practices. For instance, when it was thinking about producing new
20-dollar bills about a decade ago, the Bank of Canada completed a life-cycle assessment
of different options to produce the new bills.
 Wrap-up: life-cycle assessment is thus an accounting tool to put a number on the
environmental impact of some products or activities, by considering the impact on their
entire life, enabling comparisons among different options.

The Circular Economy Paradigm:

A related concept is the circular economy paradigm, and in many ways, it represents the
application of life-cycle thinking to the organization of the economy or of a certain economic
sector.

The idea is built on a contrast with the linear production and consumption model that has
prevailed so far, where firms extracted raw materials from the earth, transform them as needed,
use them to manufacture or create a product needed by consumers, and then these consumers
use it until it is disposed of. As we saw in the previous lesson, this model is structurally
unsustainable, as it leads to an ever-increasing amount of waste, resource depletion, and
various environmental releases like air and water pollutants.

The starting point of a circular economy is to join the end points of the linear model through
recycling and re-use. By making drastic efforts to minimize waste and maximize recycling and
reuse, resource depletion is minimized (and ideally eliminated). But the concept goes beyond
this, and involves three more aspects:
I. The minimization of environmental releases along the entire circle, from the
transformation and manufacturing activities to the use and disposal of the product,
so that the circle has no leaks; in other words, minimize environmental externalities
all along the economy.
II. A minimization of energy use.
III. To do all the above by linking the disposal stage with each of the others, not just with
the starting point of the linear model. For instance, when some products reach their
normal end of life, it may be possible to refurbish them and give them a new life so
 that another consumer can use them; or instead, it may just be a matter of linking
the distribution system with end-of-life centers, for instance if a consumer has
stopped using the good for a reason unrelated to its shape, so in this case the
product can just be inserted almost as is; and a product that has been disposed of
can be remanufactured, by using a combination of repairs and new parts.

All these operations already exist, so what the paradigm of the circular economy does is
highlight the need to make them the default organization of the economic sector. It implies a
transformation of both the organization and thinking surrounding the production process, in a
way that makes it least attractive (i.e., more costly) to extract new materials, consume energy
unnecessarily, or produce toxic or damaging releases into the environment.

Circular Economy Policy:

In terms of public policy, governments use various instruments to encourage and shape
practices to correspond with circular economy principles.

Regulation instruments may be used to encourage practices related to product end of life, for
instance by forbidding the act of sending some products to landfills; to provide norms that
ensure minimum quality standards, for instance to control the amount of hazardous substances
used in the manufacturing process; to force product labelling to inform customers of the life
cycle impact of different products; or to put in place green procurement policy for
governmental operations, so that all government purchases favour goods that are produced
with a circular economy structure.

Fiscal instruments may also be used to improve the management and production of waste and
other releases (for instance by requiring that consumers pay a dedicated fee to finance the
recycling of electronic products) or to tax certain activities such as the sending of material to
landfills or the use of certain commodities like non-renewable energy resources.

Finally, governments can support and finance the production and sharing of information
necessary for the identification of best practices or to make life cycle analysis more accessible
(especially to small private actors with limited resources), or the research and development
activities of actors.

All these measures participate in different ways, in fostering the circular paradigm by addressing
its core dimensions: the minimization of waste and of resource depletion, the minimization of
energy use, and the minimization of environmental releases along the life-cycle of a product.

The Degrowth Movement

The degrowth paradigm results from a combination of the ideas of ecological economics, which
is a discipline concerned with correcting the failures of conventional economics in addressing
environmental externalities, and an anti-consumerism perspective. Which rejects the link
between consumption and quality of life that underpins the standard development-economic
growth nexus.
More recently, the degrowth paradigm has grown in popularity in the face of failures of efforts
to pursue what’s called “absolute decoupling”, which refers to attempts to break the direct
correlation between economic growth and environmental harm, which we discussed in a
previous session. The idea of decoupling to find ways, mostly through technological innovation
and changes in practices, to decouple growth from its environmental impact, in other words to
give truly sustainable growth.

Although decoupling can involve a wide variety of efforts, its measurement is relatively
straightforward; for instance, one country that often claims to have decoupled its growth from
at least one environmental harm, greenhouse gas emissions, is Sweden and indeed, if we look
at the data from 1990 to 2017, Sweden has positive economic growth certainly within the norm
for a high-income country, and simultaneously had a decrease in its emissions by 26% over the
same period. On the face of it, this seems to demonstrate that it is possible to have economic
growth without at least its environmental externality grow at the same time.

Although this seemed promising at first, especially since Sweden did put a lot of effort in
reducing its emissions by reorganizing the way it uses energy and by taxing carbon emissions, in
particular, this picture is problematic in at least one respect: while the data may be reliable,
there are many reasons why Sweden’s emissions decreased over the period, and a strong
explanatory factor for this reduction is the shifting of the Swedish economy from heavy
industries to a service economy.

Put simply, Sweden stopped having its economy rely on heavy industry and manufacturing
sectors, which emit a large quantity of greenhouse gasses, and instead grew its service sector,
which emits a lot less.

The problem is this is not the same thing as saying that the Swedish populations stopped using
manufactured goods or heavy industry products like steel or concrete: instead, what happened
was that Sweden chose to stop making these products on Swedish territory and started buying
them from other nations instead.

But greenhouse gases are a global problem: if a source of emissions is shifted from one country
to another, the total greenhouse gases emitted on the planet does not change: it only seems
like a change because of the way we look at it, that is to say, by focusing on analyzing the data
from a national perspective: a look at Sweden makes it seem like a decoupling has occurred,
while in reality the picture is more complicated.

Things gets worse:

 Sweden has a low-emission electricity sector, which means that even its energy-intensive
industries performed better than most of their foreign counterparts in terms of the
emission required by their production, at least the part that’s met by consuming
electricity.
  By moving the production of these industries elsewhere but still maintaining its demand
for these products, the overall impact on emissions is that they increase through that
process, as industries move from sites in Sweden supplied by hydroelectricity to other
places around the world where electricity comes from the burning of coal.

As a result, degrowth advocates argue two things:

I. Even a supposedly poster child case of decoupling like Sweden has not really
succeeded in decoupling its economy from GHG emissions.
II. This suggests that it is virtually impossible to decrease environmental harms and
improve sustainability without a fundamental reduction of consumption, in other
words, by reducing the economic activity required to sustain the standards of living
of the world’s population.

We can sum up the precepts of degrowth like this:

 The main environmental impacts making the current growth model unsustainable are
directly linked to overconsumption.
 This overconsumption inevitably links to human societies reaching and overstepping the
planetary boundaries, in other words, there are limits to growth.
 This evolution is inevitable without a major change of paradigm.
 Quality of life and standards of living must be rethought from the perspective of more
general and equitable welfare, not economic growth and increases in consumption.

Conclusions:
The application of life-cycle thinking, and the circular economy and degrowth paradigms, each
provide a set of answers to major challenge of reconciling a form of economic growth, and by
extension of standards of living for populations around the world, with sustainability.

In recent years, several governments, notably the EU have put forward policy measures to
encourage the sophistication and application of life-cycle thinking and circular economy
principles to various sectors. Now these efforts require a substantial data collection effort, as
the life-cycle assessments required to understand how to make choices in this regard are
limited, although growing very fast. Once more comprehensive information is available, it
becomes easier for both private actors and governments to make choices on where to
concentrate efforts and how exactly to do so.

The degrowth paradigm, marginal up until a few years ago, has now picked up some political
steam in some regions of the world, where there are concerns over the likelihood for success in
trying to find a way to reconcile a decrease in consumption and sustenance of standards of
living. For the moment, policy attention has been limited and certainly struggling with how to
achieve this, despite the convincing arguments of its proponents.

Lesson 4.3: Finance and Sustainability: Greening Investment Funds and Supply Chains

Greening and the Green Economy:

The term greening generally implies transforming activities into a more sustainable and
environmentally friendly version. A green economy, for instance, is one that focuses on
improving sustainability and reducing environmental degradation.

As we have seen in a different lesson, many governments around the world have implemented
policies aiming to foster this green economy.

Some did this in applying circular economy principles, while that vast majority focused much
more generally on creating jobs and encouraging innovation in environmentally friendly
activities, such as renewable energy, pollution abating technologies, or public transit.

In this lesson, we focus more specifically on financial and economic actors, and overview more
specific efforts to transform financial actors and the supply chain of large multinationals (efforts
to “green”):
1. Green Bonds and Green Funds
2. Investment Funds
3. Supply Chains

Green Bonds and Green Funds:

A bond is a financial instrument through which the issuer owed the buyer a dent and,
depending on the terms of the bond, pays them interest.

The bond is a form of a loan:

The holder of the bond is the lender, for instance an individual investor or a pension fund, while
the issuer, for instance a private company or a governmental authority, is the borrower.

Bonds are normally considered very safe investments, as the issuer is normally a reputable
institution like a government, and as a result constitutes a large share of private investments,
including for pension investment.

“Green” bonds refer to such financial instruments when they are explicitly linked to solution or
improvements to sustainability issues, where 100% of the proceeds are earmarked for projects
or assets that fit within the recognized definition of climate mitigation or adaptation projects.

Green bonds are a relatively new but fast-growing instrument. Canada, for instance, came in the
10th worldwide position in green bonds issuance in 2018, with $5.5 billion dollars, around the
same amount as was issued for 2017, bringing its cumulative issuance to around $15.2 billion.
therefore, issuance has gone up significantly and only very recently, an issuance for 2017 was
more than for all previous years combined.

Worldwide, an estimate of climate aligned bonds puts the cumulative insurance at $1.45 trillion
in total value around the world issued since 2005.
Green bonds can be issued by governments, to finance climate change policy-related projects,
by local authorities, to finance smaller-scale climate action in municipalities, or by large
companies looking to finance activities related to climate change mitigation or adaptation,
either directly emitted by the company like Hydro-Quebec or through a bank like TD.

This accomplishes the twin objective of providing a way for investors, small and large, to ensure
that their money is put into the fight for sustainability in addition to an attractive yield, and that
action necessary for the environmental objectives on global issues like climate change get the
financing they require, as rapidly as possible.

Investment Funds:
This transformation of the investment world is accompanied by the presence of funds set up by
governmental authorities to focus specifically on climate-change mitigation and adaptation,
often financed through the proceeds of environmental taxes on fossil fuel consumption or on
carbon emissions.

For instance, the proceeds from GHG emission permits sold by the government of Quebec on its
joint cap-and-trade market with California goes into the Green Fund, which finances projects
directly targeted at reducing GHG emissions. Other jurisdictions around the world have similar
funds set up with the proceeds of either taxes on GHG emissions or cap-and-trade market
revenues.

But these funds are a very small part of the investment world, occupied overwhelmingly by
large scale private and public finds, including investment funds and hedge funds but also
investment banks and pension funds.

A large part of this sector is seeing a large-scale transformation toward greening the impact of
their investment, for instance:
 More than 400 financial institutions, firms and organizations around the world
supported the recommendations of the Financial Stability Board’s Taskforce on Climate-
related Financial Disclosures, which was tasked by the G20 and the European
Commission to look at climate-related investment.
 All 6 major Canadian banks, in addition to the Quebec-based Desjardins cooperative and
the Caisse de Dépôt et Placement du Québec, an institutional investor that manages
several pension funds in the province of Quebec, are among the signatories of the
declaration.
 In 2017, the CDPQ presented its Climate change investment strategy, which plans for a
50% increase of low-carbon investments before 2020, as well as the taking into
consideration of the climate factor in every investment decision. The purpose is to
reduce the carbon intensity of its investment portfolio by 25% before 2025.
 More than 2000 institutional investors combining assets of more than $82 trillion dollars
have also signed the United Nations Principles of Responsible Investment and have
committed to integrating environmental issues to their investment practices.
Part of the actions taken target existing portfolios of investment.

Divestment refers to the removal of funds and ownership away from activities having a large
carbon footprint.

For instance, a large investment fund like an investment bank or a pension fund diversifies its
investment to maximize the portfolio growth rate, and in doing to it buys, for instance, shares of
various projects and companies. Since the objective is to diversify, this involves investing in
companies from several sectors, to minimize the risk that the fund’s value will be affected by a
downturn in a single sector.

Green divestment strategies involve the assessment of which of these investments corresponds
to activities with the largest carbon footprint. For instance, if one of the companies in which the
fund has invested is an oil and gas exploration firm, then it is likely that its carbon footprint is
much larger than another firm that constructs LEED buildings. Therefore, a fund in this case
would attempt to move its funds away from the first firm, for instance by selling the oil and gas
company’s sticks that it holds and reinvest them instead in the second company.

Many of the pledges and commitments mentioned earlier in this lesson involves such
divestment, as the application of green criteria for future investments is not necessarily seen as
sufficient for many of these actors and their shareholders.

But there is another dimension to the phenomenon of green divestment, and its related to
social pressure, either from the public or stakeholders or from environmental lobby groups, for
some institutions and large investment funds to accelerate this divestment.

In a now famous case, some in the divestment movement have focused on Harvard University’s
endowment fund, the largest academic fund in the world at around $40 billion.
Students and activists have organized a campaign over the past few years to convince the
University to divest its holdings in fossil fuel companies.
For these actors, the rationale is obvious: in addition to the symbolism of the message that such
a divestment would send if done by a reputable institution like Harvard, there is an inherent
contradiction in the fact that Harvard prides itself in being at the cutting edge of climate
change-related research, all the while betting on the fossil fuel industry, responsible for a very
large share of global warming.
From the university’s perspective, however, the main responsibility of the fund is to ensure its
long-term viability, and the political act of divesting away from the fossil fuel industry could put
this viability in jeopardy.
This sums up, in many ways, the challenges in establishing an economic rationale for green
divesting. The proponents of the divestment movement argue that urgent climate action is
required, and a loosely coordinated effort worldwide by large institutional actors to increase the
cost of doing business in sectors with large carbon footprints by making funds harder to get is
an essential part of the governance of the global warming issue.
Greening Supply Chains:
Some large multinationals also try to transform their activities.

These strategies have various objectives, from reducing inefficiencies to merely personal
conviction on the part of managers and owners.

Regardless of the importance of the environmental profile of the people putting forward these
strategies, several firms have realized that greening activities makes economic sense, as
reducing resources waste decreases operational costs, and obtaining the reputational benefits
of improving the sustainability of a firm’s practices and offering products built with
environmental concerns in mind attracts a rapidly growing mass of costumers that put value on
such product features.

Some firms are of course specializing in sustainability or in green products, from household
cleaning products to zero-emission cars.

What we discuss here are large firms that design strategies to transform their entire operations
to become more sustainable, including through the offering of products with a much smaller
environmental footprint. These strategies often start from the desire to apply very general
sustainability principles but putting them into practice involves challenges.

To illustrate some of these, we will look at Walmart’s strategies over the past decade and a half
to improve the sustainability of its practices, through a manufactured strategy.
Walmart is a retail corporation operating more than 11,000 stores worldwide and is the world’s
largest corporation by revenue at over $500 billion/year.
Starting in 2005, the company launched a series of efforts to green its activities, successively
targeting various aspects of the company’ operations.
At first, Walmart attempted to both significantly reduce its energy consumption, and committed
to using more energy from renewable sources.
Then Walmart also aimed to reduce the waste produced by its stores, with the aim to reach
near-zero waste. The company has also put a target for its food waste production, with Walmart
Canada, for instance, committing to zero food waste before 2025.
Walmart also publishes information guidelines for customers understand when these should be
discarded and to dispel myths on this aspect of consumption.
While there has been significant progress achieved by the company since these commitments,
its management quickly realized that a full transformation of what it sold, and how it’s made,
required the involvement of its thousands of suppliers as well. After all, Walmart is a retailer,
which means that most of the activities involved in the life cycle of the products it sells are done
upstream in the production process, that is, among its supplier’s operations.
Therefore, the company has pressured its suppliers to follow sustainability reporting
requirements, to document the environmental impacts of their operations.
In doing so, Walmart has tried to set up a sustainability index based on this information, both to
judge the efforts of its suppliers and to advise them on what to target to improve their
sustainability. The production of this. Index has been a challenge, as there are some
disagreements over how to rank some environmental impacts.
Then, in 2017, Walmart has launched Project Gigaton, which asks its suppliers to cut 1 billion
ton of greenhouse gas emissions from their operations before 2030, to reduce the impact of its
supply chain on climate change.
Throughout these efforts, the case of Walmart illustrates the challenges of achieving a
meaningful transformation of a global supply chain. It also illustrates some of the most
important hidden benefits and difficulties of such efforts.
On the more negative side, focusing on customers, for instance, by providing them with more
information on the sustainability value of the products they buy, is less effective than focusing
directly on suppliers, especially when the bulk of the customer base for a company is low-income
buyers that favour price above all, out of necessity for many.
The ideal, then, for a company like Walmart, is to find ways to improve sustainability without
affecting customers at all. This is easier said than done, of course, but it remains the most
effective strategy overall.
On the more positive side, such action by a giant like Walmart does have an impact on the
practices of thousands of smaller companies, but also large ones that still rely on Walmart to
sell their products to customers. This raises awareness about sustainability in companies that
are not leaders in the domain, and in some cases forces them to revaluate their operations, for
instance, a large survey of companies like Coca-Cola and Timberland has shown that when they
try to better understand how to improve the sustainability of their operations, Walmart is the
top-cited retailer driving these suppliers’ investments into the sustainability of their products.

Conclusions:
To conclude, large financial and economic actors are key in driving action on sustainability and
climate-related efforts.
There is often a ripple effect from efforts by some key large actors, as their leadership and
commitments can have an important impact on other actors as well.
The uncoordinated aspect of these efforts complicates a more oriented transition of the global
economy toward sustainability.

Lesson 4.4: Case Study: Trade Arrangements for Toxic Waste

Governance Efforts to the Trade in Toxic Waste:

The issue of transboundary trade in hazardous waste illustrates very well the difficulties of
coping with both a rapid and continuous increase in consumption and production around the
world.

On the face of it, overwhelmingly, the concern is about toxic materials exported from countries
that are members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD),
which correspond to the wealthiest countries in the world, to non-OECD countries. However,
the quantity of this trade remains limited, certainly dwarfed by trade in many other transformed
materials.
Nevertheless, this hides the sustainability challenges present in this phenomenon, including the
fact that many receiving countries lack the means or technology to manage the waste without
significant impact on the environment and on the health of its populations.

In many ways, there is a contradiction in this very trend: if sustainability was the go-to for the
world economy, we would see the opposite: the toxic waste would go to developed countries,
which have both superior resources and more efficient and effective technologies to deal with
the waste in the first place.

What explains this pattern, then, and what are the difficulties in trying to reverse it to ensure a
proper management of toxic waste globally?
What kind of global efforts are made to resolve this problem and ensure a more sustainable
management of this waste?

1. Problem Identification and Definition:

The trade in hazardous materials involves two related problems:
I. To find a way to manage hazardous waste in a way that prevents its worst impact
on the environment.
II. Given the high cost associated with its treatment, hazardous waste is often sent
from its site of production to low-income countries, where it is dumped or not
disposed of adequately, leading to both the most severe health and
environmental hazard born on populations in the proximity of the dumping sites,
with little responsibility taken from actors responsible for its production.
Both these dimensions are compounded by the fact that much of this trade exists in
clandestine activities.

For instance, studies have documented how certain operators will mislabel the
shipments as something else, from non-toxic materials to humanitarian aid, for instance.
Others have used secretive dumping sites at night.

This is intended to prevent existing regulation to apply to these shipments, especially

when these regulations are poorly enforced.

The mislabelling does not just lead to shipments being accepted in developing country
destinations despite going against local regulation:
It has also created a health problem for instance where the cargo is later manipulated,
based on the faulty labelling, resulting in the poisoning or hospitalization of workers due
to chemical burns.
Governments in high income countries started to act on this problem by enacting more
stringent regulations governing the treatment of waste, resulting in a raise of the cost of
disposing of the waste. As an unintended result, it became economically logical for debt-
ridden developing countries to get paid for accepting the waste, even though many had
no capacity for treating it adequately.
2. Actors, Groups, and Positions Defended:
In the global action on this issue over the past 30 years, it is difficult to overstate the role
that environmental NGOs have played in both raising awareness to the issue and
documenting it to inform global discussions by state actors over how to deal with the
problem.

For instance, in 1986 a ship departed from Philadelphia carrying 14,000 tonnes of toxic
incinerator ash, and Greenpeace alerted all likely ports suggested by the ship’s route. As
a result, the ship was turned away many times, and erred around the world for 27
months, before dumping its waste into the Indian Ocean, as it is suspected. Greenpeace
also published research around that time that documented the attempts to export such
material, putting an order of magnitude on the problem while the UNEP formed a
working group to study what to do about the issue.

In the late 1980s, the international campaign by global environmental NGOs led to an
alliance with developing countries to pressure industrialized countries into accepting a
ban on such trade, or at the very least to overhaul regulation of waste disposal to
prevent the problem created by companies sending their waste to dumping sites in
developing countries.

This led to the creation of a network with the banner International Toxic Waste Action
Network.

In many ways, this is the main clash in the debate over global governance efforts on the
trade of hazardous waste:
Developing countries, backed by environmental NGOs, would like an arrangement where
industrialized countries never send any such waste, unless under previously agreed
upon, very strict conditions.

For some industrialized countries, on the other hand, the problem can be handled by
low-income countries managing the monitoring of the arrival of such shipments to their
shores. So largely, this is an issue about who should be responsible to enforce the
regulations, with developing countries contending that they do not always have the
means to enforce a ban on toxic waste imports, for instance, and that as a result, the
only truly effective way to prevent this trade lies in the enforcement of export bans from
developed countries.

3. Institutions, Norms, & Current Practices:

Several developing countries decided to enact outright bans on hazardous waste
imports, while high-income countries were more hesitant to propose bans on exports.

The resulting agreement was the Basel Convention on the Control of Transboundary
Movements of Hazardous Wastes and Their Disposal, often simply known as the Basel
 Convention. It was largely based on high-income countries’ preferences of a system of
prior and written informed consent, in line with prevailing general trade regulations.

The agreement was poorly received by environmental organizations because of its timid
dispositions, and African delegates walked out and eventually signed parallel
agreements, including the Lomé IV convention with the European Economic Community,
banning exports from European countries to the 69 countries of the African, Caribbean,
and Pacific group of states.

4. Policy Objectives and Effectiveness

The Basel Convention had three explicit objectives:
I. Minimize the transboundary movement of hazardous waste while reducing the
overall volume produced at the source.
II. Promote the “proximity principle”, whereby waste is disposed of as near to its
source as possible.
III. Prohibit the shipment of waste to countries lacking the sufficient capacity to
manage them in an environmentally sound manner.
Although these principles were not supported by legal constraints, they hinged on the
principle of “prior informed consent”, which means that shipments are permitted if the
competent authority in a receiving country that has no national ban accepts them.

There are many ways in which this treaty was seen as grossly insufficient:
 Key terms like “environmentally sound” or even “hazardous waste” were only
vaguely defined an open to significant interpretation.
 An enforcement mechanism to halt shipments that did not obtain prior consent
was lacking.
 Radioactive waste was not included in the treaty.
 Little provisions were made to deal with non-compliance, and no participation
from the US.
 Another shortcoming of the convention is the underfinancing of the Basel
secretariat, in addition to insufficient resources and competence in receiving
countries to detect fraud like mislabelling and thus to make informed decisions
prior to consent.

Nevertheless, the convention initiated a process of frequent meeting through

Conferences of the Parties, which did address some of these shortcomings, notably the
definitional ambiguities.

A ban of hazardous waste exports form OECD countries to non-OECD countries was
adopted, although as of 2019 it still hasn’t reached the threshold of ratification to come
into force.

Although the initial signatories of the Basel convention were just a few dozens, they are
now 186. Additionally, the EU and some key member countries like Germany have been
 at work to reflect the objectives of the convention’s internal regulations, for instance by
adopting provisions requiring producers to reduce waste generation and monitor waste
movement.

Here's the state of the problem now:

A thorny issue that makes some industrialized countries more hesitant is whether to
have an exclusion for waste shipments destined to recycling. Although this provision
provides an obvious gateway for manipulation if interpreted loosely, countries like
Canada and Germany have made it clear that they opposed an inclusion of this provision
in the agreement, as they see it as potentially impeding recycling efforts.

More recently, this discussion has been given more importance due to the spectacular
increase in electronic waste (for instance, old computers, smartphones, and electronic
equipment), which contains some toxic materials, as well as the dismantling of ships for
recyclable parts, a process which releases toxic waste to which workers are exposed.

A lot of the discussion on this type of trade has to do with perceptions over
environmental justice considerations, bunding of the issue of toxic waste trade from
OECD to non-OECD with more general waste trading patterns, highlighting
environmental justice concerns:

A few years ago, china reversed its policy of accepting most plastic waste, citing its
inability to treat the growing quantity sent to it by many trading partners. The upscaling
of efforts to recycle plastic in developed countries was highly dependent on the sending
of this plastic to China, and as a result many are still struggling with what to do to keep
recycling rates at current levels or raise it higher given this development.

Several countries in Asia have also started to enforce import bans not just on toxic waste,
but on all kinds of waste from OECD countries.

This has led to complicated cases such as the Canada-Philippines trade dispute, where
the Philippines prevented a shipment of Canadian waste mislabeled as recycling material
from reaching its shore, leading to a six-year dispute to send back the stranded shipment
to Canada, finally resolved in June of 2019.

As a result, despite the criticism of the Basel Convention related to the handling of the
trade in hazardous material issue, the more general problem of waste management is
now complicated by developing countries’ concerns over their capacity to handle their
own waste, leading to efforts to reduce trade in waste more generally. This puts pressure
on countries around the world to significantly improve the management of waste in
general, including recycling activities.

Lesson 5: Managing Natural Resources

5.1: Mineral Resources

Natural Resources vs. Mineral Resources:

We begin our discussion of sustainability issues as they characterize the management of natural
resources by talking about mineral resources. To many people, mineral resources are what
comes immediately to mind when we use the term natural resources: they exist in nature, and
they are resources that we humans mine and transform to obtain services, for instance, refined
metals to build structures or various materials, from wires to computers.

By using the term mineral resources, we point to the Earth. Although this definition includes
energy resources like petroleum and coal, since we give energy special attention in a separate
section, we will focus in this section on non-energy mineral resources.

1. Overview: some mineral resources present some characteristics of global public goods,
as they are found in very large quantities (so the rival aspect is met, as my extraction
does not prevent anyone else from extracting them as well) and they are, in theory at
least, accessible by anyone willing to do so (so they are non-exclusive).
But as we discussed in an earlier lesson, this is at best a misleading description.
2. Property Rights Regimes: first, property rights regimes around the world make most
mineral resources owned by either a public or private entity.
When the rights are owned by public actors like governments, they control who gets
access by granting extraction permits in exchange for a royalty, or by selling the land
containing the deposits to private actors.
3. Deposit Size vs. Human Demand: second, not all minerals are found in quantities
sufficiently large for humans to extract them without at least a long-term impact on the
reserves available, and the size of human populations in the 21 st century makes the
extraction of most useful mineral resources reach quantities that do matter for the
sustainability of the activity.
In other words, it is very likely that the rival nature of the goods leads to depletion.
This is even more problematic for mineral resources that may be very useful but not
found in quantities large enough for extraction do not matter.
4. Advancement of Technology: finally, a third limit to discussion of mineral resources as
public goods is the advancement in technologies to extract them. In practice, the advent
of new extraction techniques at reasonable costs changes the assessments of the
possibilities for some resources to be extracted economically, opening access to new
deposits, for instance at the bottom of the oceans or in other less accessible places.
5. Wrap-up: these aspects illustrate how the concept of public goods is largely dependent
on the governance arrangements prevailing.
With the enforcement of property rights, for instance, resources may be depleted much
more rapidly, as the owner of the deposit will have the incentive to extract as much
value from the deposit in as short a period as possible.
Virtually all mineral resources are extracted because of a service they can provide, for
instance, we use copper to build cables, therefore copper must be extracted to obtain
this service.
 However, very few raw materials are present in the Earth in the form needed to obtain
the service for which they are sought.
As a result, initial extraction and transformation is required and takes various forms.
In some cases, these processes are relatively straightforward, for instance when sand is
mined to be used in construction. In other cases, like rare earth elements which are used
in many high technologies, minerals are both difficult to extract and separate from each
other, and complex to transform into the form adequate for their intended use.

Non-Energy Mineral Resources Activities:

We can roughly divide the activities linked to mineral resources into three categories for our
discussion:
1. Mining: mining activities present several challenges in terms of their impact on the
environment. We briefly overview these here and discuss what type of action is taken to
reduce these impacts, when they exist:
- Landscape Transformation: large-scale mining operations require significant
alterations to the landscape.
In part, of course, this is merely because of the need to dig deep into the ground to
access the deposits. By extension, this often requires significant deforestation.
But there’s more to this alteration, as operations also require the use of significant
quantities of water, and entire bodies of water may be diverted or depleted to make
the mining operation possible.
The issue of sustainability appears when these changes are not completed in a way
that may be reversed in the future, which has been most mining operations so far.
- Extraction Site Pollution: apart from the pollution caused by transformation of the
landscape, mining operations require a large amount of heavy machinery, emitting
air and water pollution in large quantities and contributing to climate change while
the mine is active.
The energy necessary to power this machinery is overwhelmingly supplied by fossil
fuels like diesel and natural gas, and there are only limited applications to renewable
and clean energy to diminish this pollution.
Additionally, toxic chemicals are sometimes used to facilitate some operations, some
of which leak into the ground or in nearby water streams.
- Local Species Impact: Due to the size of most economical mining sites and the
transformation of the landscape required to operate them, many species are often
displaced in order to set up the operation.
This results in a loss of biodiversity in the region, also a change that is often
impossible to reverse once the operation is terminated.
- Health Issues and Labour Practices: in many places around the world, mining
operations occur under unacceptable labour conditions, with both exploitation of
workers and their exposition to health and security hazards.
Although there has been some effort to force large mining multinationals to apply
good working conditions even when they operate in countries with little regulations
in this regard, many operations by these and local companies still put workers at risk.
 Moreover, since mining in low-income regions is often the only source of revenue for
inhabitants of the region, workers may be forced to accept dangerous conditions and
very low wages.
- Extraction Site Pollution
- Finite Resource Depletion: mining operations deplete the deposit targeted.
Therefore, this raises a sustainability problem because if the deposit is depleted and
depending on the prospects and technologies available to recycle the mineral, future
generations may not be able to obtain the same services due to extraction today.
Very rarely are mineral deposits managed in a way that considers the global
depletion of the mineral, as this requires collaboration among all countries siting on
deposits.
- Resource Curse, Corruption and Conflict
Governance efforts to resolve sustainability challenges posed by mining operations are
complicated by the fact that many operations occur in countries with non-democratic or
corrupt political regimes.
Although this is often referred to as the resource curse, referring to the paradox that a
boon is valuable natural resources often does not result in development and instead
may contribute to corruption and armed conflict, this link is more complex.
2. Extraction and Transformation: extracting minerals to provide a service useful to
humans requires a few operations to transform what is available in the Earth into a raw
material usable in various applications.
Typically, mining requires the extraction of the usable mineral from an ore, which is
rocks and sediments containing a concentration of the material high enough to allow its
economical extraction. For instance, iron is found in iron ore in the ground, out of which
metallic iron can be extracted through refining, if and where the concentration is high
enough.
This extraction, however, may result in negative impacts on the environment, which vary
by the type of operation and the mineral extracted. These impacts can roughly be
divided into air and water pollution, and energy and water use.
Regarding the air and water pollution, refining operations result in air pollutants being
emitted because of the chemical transformation process necessary to extract the
minerals from the ore. Toxic chemicals are also needed to complete the extraction
process, some of which leak into the ground or in water streams unless managed
properly.
The second category of impacts, energy, and water use, refers to the very large
quantities of energy and water necessary for the refining processes.
Since this refining often necessitated very high temperatures, a significant amount of
energy is necessary to create the heat, typically coming from burning fossil fuels.
This results not only in a contribution to the depletion of fossil fuel reserves around the
world, but also in greenhouse gases being emitted and contributing to global warming.
Very high temperatures also imply cooling operations after the operations are
completed, and here water is often used.
In theory this can be done sustainably, that is, water can be recycled after it has
absorbed the heat.
 However, given the use of some toxic chemicals in the refining process, the water used
for cooling may be contaminated by the chemicals and cannot be sent back to water
streams without proper treatment.
3. End of Life of Mining Sites: finally, an often-forgotten sustainability issue directly linked
to mineral resources is the management of the mining site after the operation has
ended, because the deposit has been depleted or for any other reason.
Given the many impacts on the landscape on the local wildlife due to the installation and
operations of the mining activities, a considerable amount of cleanup must be done to
restore the site to its original conditions to minimize the long-term impact of the
disruption caused by the mining activities.
Given the extent of these efforts and the lack of economic value in completing them,
mining companies are often reluctant to take over the entire cost involved in the effort,
which requires governments to ensure that liability resides with the mining company.
Even for willing governments, this is easier said than done, as some private actors have
deployed imaginative efforts to avoid responsibility or have used loopholes in the
concession arrangements and completed only limited cleanup and restoration.
These difficulties are compounded by the fact that in many cases, the mining operation
goes on for several years or decades.
As a result, planning over this long period for the restoration efforts necessary in the
aftermath is difficult and often neglected.
Additionally, some sites are in remote regions where public pressure may not be a factor
in ensuring that governments enforce proper conditions on mining actors.
Note that the lack of public pressure does not always result from the operations
occurring in less populated regions: often the mines are simply situated in regions
inhabited by indigenous populations marginalized by the political regime in place; so the
lack of an impact by public pressure may actually be a lack of consideration for
grievances from the populations concerned.

Public and Private Governance Efforts:

Given the long list of sustainability issues surrounding mineral resources, there are various
governance efforts to decrease, minimize, or avoid them altogether.

Many governments use policies directly tailored to each of the issues mentioned previously, and
space lacks here to cover every single policy instrument used.

We can simply state that it is possible to use a combination of regulation and fiscal and
economic incentives to ensure that the operations are completed in a manner conductive to
sustainability, even though this has been proven very challenging so far.

In addition to these direct governance arrangements, international cooperation exists to

minimize at least the worst impacts of the mining sector around the world.
Since mining operations and transformation are done overwhelmingly by private actors, much
of this discussion occurs through the frame of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), a type of
private business self-regulation.

CSR implies that a firm goes beyond compliance with regulatory requirements, setting up a
strategy and behavioural norm through which it attempts to further some social good outside of
the firm’s business interests.

Fostering CSR:
The mining sector has been a central to discussions over how to foster and encourage firms to
develop corporate social responsibility plans, given the sector’s deleterious impact on the
environment and workers, in regions where little legal and regulatory constraints or guidelines
exist.

CSR strategies encourage the company to have a more positive impact on these issues, even
when they are not legally required to do so.

Although CSR is first and foremost a private, single organization level concept, cooperation and
arrangements are often put in place to ensure its application to several actors or even an entire
sector.

In the case of the mining sector, this has taken the form of the Extractive Industry Transparency
Initiative, a global standard for the good governance of mineral resources, as well as oil and gas.

The EITI exists to improve the key governance issues in the extractive sector, requiring
information from the industry’s value chain.

This includes information on operations at the point of extraction, but also on how revenues are
shared between the company and the host government, and how the company’s operation
contributes to the local economy.

For instance, this information can include the process through which licences and contracts are
allocated and registered, the details of fiscal and legal arrangements, the quantities produce,
and the impact on local employment.

Implementation of the EITI:

The EITI standard is implemented in 52 countries around the world.

Each of these countries is required to publish an annual EITI Report to disclose information on
contracts and licenses, production, revenue collection/allocation, and social and economic
spending.
The EITI followed years of discussion over potential governance arrangements that would
address both the resource curse and the sustainable development challenges linked to the
sector.
There is no shortage of criticism of the EITI, ranging from NGOs complaining about the lack of
sanction possibilities, to business actors worried that the EITI is largely influenced by civil
society organizations.

These criticisms notwithstanding, it does represent, for now, a key component of international
governance for the extractive sector.

Conclusion:
 Mineral resources present several sustainability challenges in the activities surrounding
mining, extraction and transformation, and the management of sites after the end of
operations.
 Most of these challenges are not met by governance arrangements and government
policies that eliminate them altogether.
 When they exist, effort is complicated by the presence of other governance challenges
including:
- Corruption
- Non-democratic governments
- Relationships with indigenous communities inhabiting the regions where the
deposits are found

5.2: Forests and Agricultural Land

Sustainability Issues Related to Forests and Agricultural Land:

Although each of these present their own characteristics, they also have similarities as they
represent resources linked to land, in that humans use land to grow other resources that we
then use for various services:
 Forests are cut down to obtain lumber which serves various purposes, from structures
and buildings to paper.
 Arable land is used for agriculture to obtain food crops.
 Arable land is also used for fuel crops, which refers to crops that may or may not be
edible and that are transformed into liquid fuels like ethanol and biodiesel, which are
then mixed with gasoline or diesel.
 Land in and of itself is used for developments, for instance to erect buildings for
residential, commercial, or industrial purposes, or for cattle grazing.

Land, Forests and Sustainability:

We can then consider at least one straightforward categorization of sustainability issues linked
to these resources:
I. First, in theory the resources we extract form land are renewable, so one concern is
to ensure that current practices maintain this capacity to provide services in a
renewable manner. If human capacity destroys the capacity for land to grow what is
needed, then we can consider the resource to be depleted (at least for several
years), just like any other depleted resource.
 II. Second, human activities involved in the extraction of services from land may also
produce negative impacts on the environment, contributing for instance to climate
change.
Each of these two categories will be discussed in this section by focusing on three sustainability
issues linked to land:
1. Deforestation
2. Agricultural practices
3. Land management and climate change

Deforestation:
Deforestation is one of the main drivers of the destruction of natural habitats. In turn producing
a loss in biodiversity.

Especially in biodiversity hotbeds like rainforests, unsustainable deforestation results in large

numbers of trees being cut down, often for one of two reasons: lumber, and space for land
development (i.e., land conversion either for agriculture, human constructions and urban
expansion, or grazing space for cattle).

Deforestation is a multifaced sustainability problem that may be more complex than typically
thought.

The use of forest resources for services, including through cutting down vegetation, need not be
non-renewable: after all, it is possible for the resource to regenerate itself after vegetation is cut
down.

However, two reasons make this outcome less common:

I. One reason is simply costs: in certain deforestation operations, the cost of using
practices that will ensure rapid regeneration of the forest are higher than rapid
clearcutting techniques.
Clearcutting or other rapid cutting techniques are thus preferred in many regions of
the world, resulting in soil degradation, and in turn a degradation of the forest’s
capacity to regenerate rapidly.
II. The second is even more fundamental: logging often favours the cutting down of
mature trees, meaning that even with proper soil management after the fact, several
decades are necessary for trees to grow back completely.
These two reasons highlight the fact that the concept of resources that are “renewable” can
have different meanings, and in our discussions of sustainability governance, we consider
resources to be renewable when they are so at human scale, in line with the overarching
definition of sustainable development.
Therefore, logging practices that cause forests to need several decades to grow back lead us to
question the sustainability of the resource as defined by the capacity for future generations to
obtain the same services as we get from it.
But beyond the simple concerns about forest regeneration, deforestation leads to other
problems.
 During those years and decades while the forest is now significantly diminished, other
environmental impacts result.
 As already mentioned, an important loss of biodiversitry, especially in forests rich in
species, follows from deforestation of this type.
 Soil degradation due to clear logging practices also occur alongside soil erosion in the
absence of trees, resulting in a loss in the capacity of forests to provide other important
services like tempering or blocking floods, storms, and so on.

Agricultural Practices:
Large-scale agriculture, especially industrial-scale agriculture, has been criticized on
sustainability grounds for quite some time now.

While the advent of modern agricultural practices and technology has led to spectacular
increases in yields and productivity of land, in many cases it came at the price of much higher
risk of damaging the land’s capacity to regenerate rapidly and continue providing the services in
a renewable manner.

One issue results from the extensive use of fertilizer to increase crop yields, which indeed
results in high levels of production for a given parcel of land, but which also causes unintended
effects.

Notably, part of the nitrogen used in fertilizers is not absorbed by the crops, and instead finds its
way into the surrounding ecosystems.

The list of unintended effects is unfortunately long, ranging from the destruction of species in
water-based environments, to contributions to climate change, as nitrous oxide created from
fertilizer by soil bacteria is a greenhouse gas almost 300 times more potent than carbon dioxide
in terms of its atmosphere warming effect.

Beyond fertilizer-related sustainability concerns, soil degradation results from extensive

monoculture, favoured in industrial agricultural production systems.

A large factor explaining the substantially increased land productivity over the past half century
has been the reliance on monoculture, a practice by which a single crop or species is planted in
a field at the same time.

While this results in higher yields, its continuous use over several consecutive years depletes the
soil’s nutrients.
This has a double effect:
 On the one hand, soil quality is deteriorated, decreasing yield for later years, potentially
leading to a severe depletion that may be difficult to reverse over the longer term.
  On the other hand, this decreased soil quality increases the need for fertilizer to
maintain acceptable yields, contributing to the fertilizer-related problems discussed
previously.

Land Management and Climate Change:

Land management is directly linked to climate change concerns, as changes in land use have an
impact on net greenhouse gas emissions.

More specifically, forests are one of the main brakes on greenhouse gas emissions, as they
capture a significant portion of carbon emissions through the photosynthesis process.

Therefore, deforestation leads to a higher quantity of net emissions, at least in the short term
while the forest grows back to mature levels.

This can happen for various reasons:

 Forest land can be converted to crop land for agriculture.
 Forests can be cut down for lumber and may take years to re-grow, or even be cut in a
way that prevents the forest from growing again, as we saw earlier.
 Forest land can be converted to commercial or residential land.

International collaboration in the fight against climate change has long recognized the
importance of the role of land management.

When measuring greenhouse gas emissions, for instance, the United Nations Framework
Convention on Climate Change, which dictates standards for countries to measure emissions,
has outlined a category called Land Use, Land Use Change and Forestry, or LULUCF.

It is defined as covering emissions and removals of greenhouse gases resulting from direct
human-induced land use such as settlements and commercial uses, land use change, and
forestry activities.

As a result, it is part of both climate modelling and of strategies for climate change mitigation,
and countries are encouraged to design plans to integrate this dimension in their climate
change efforts, especially when they have significant land and forest resources.

In some cases, forests are seen as a potentially effective strategy to combat climate change on
the longer term, as increasing forests would enable the capturing of larger quantities of
greenhouse gases and temper the impact of human activities on global warming, giving more
time to societies to transform and drastically reduce their emissions.

This role was recognized in the REDD+ approach within the UNFCCC negotiation process, which
stands for Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation and the role of
conservation, sustainable management of forests and enhancement of forest carbon stocks in
developing countries.
REDD+ provides rules and financial support to encourage developing countries to use a variety
of forest management options to reduce emissions.

Conclusion:
Beyond the challenges overviewed above, additional concerns are raised in relation to the
sustainable exploitation and management of land and forests, notably agricultural land
diversion for growing fuel crops, through which arable land previously used for food crops is
converted for non-food applications, and competition for land ownership, which largely takes
place in developing countries where foreign actors purchase large swaths of land to grow food
and fuel crops.

Forests and agricultural land are resources that historically have led to hotly contested cross
state collaboration efforts, as the sensitivity of sovereignty concerns surrounding these vital
resources makes the topic particularly contentious.

5.3: Water and Oceans

Introduction to Water, Oceans, and Sustainability:

After mineral and land-based resources, the third category of resources we discuss is water and
oceans. Just like for the first two categories, societies extract services from these resources,
sometimes in very fundamental ways.

For instance, fresh water is necessary for survival, and oceans have provided a rich source of
feedstock for humans for most of their history.

This helps to point out at least the most fundamental reasons to give attention to the
sustainability of these resources and to the services they provide.

Nonetheless, there are more dimensions to questions related to sustainability when discussing
water resources. In this lesson, we overview the main ones.

Let’s start with fresh water.

Fresh water is essential to human survival, so one obvious concern to begin this discussion is
ensuring the sustainability of access to fresh water to all populations around the world.

Two main issues arise:

1. Fresh water availability: The first issue is that fresh water is available in limited quantity
on the surface of the globe.
Even though over 70% of the Earth is covered with water, well under 1% of this is
freshwater that is accessible for human consumption.

Therefore, attention must be put to ensuring that it is not depleted or contaminated to

an extent that results in lack of access by certain populations. Industrial activity and
 improper waste disposal result in contamination or overuse of the resource, threatening
global stocks on the long term.
2. Geographical distribution: The second issue to consider is that in addition to the hazards
of unsustainable human impacts on certain bodies of fresh water, this resource, like
most others, is not distributed in a way that corresponds to human needs.

For instance, the Great Lakes in North America, shared between the United States and
Canada, contain 21% of the world’s surface freshwater resources, while the two
countries combine to only 7% of the world’s population.

This situation is quite different elsewhere in the world, where population density may be
much higher, and the freshwater resources may also be more limited.

To put this in perspective, the per capita equivalent of the available renewable fresh
water in Canada is over 80 thousand cubic meters per person.

This goes down to two thousand in China, and even down to 679 in Bangladesh.

Even these are not extreme cases like Egypt, which has a population needing much more
freshwater than is provided by the country’s resources, requiring the country to consider
imports and costly desalination plants.

Then, part of the management challenge related to clean water has to do with ensuring
a proper distribution of this vital resources around the world, and with ensuring that
shortages and droughts can be successfully managed, that is, without resulting in human
death.

Governance Arrangements:
Attempts have been made overtime to design governance arrangements that would at least
temper these possibilities:
  Governments in many regions of the world have made it illegal to dump toxic
contaminants in the water, for instance, or have forced responsibility onto the owners of
the source of the pollution to pay for the water treatment.
 Public authorities have also put a price on water so that conservation and efficiency in its
use is encouraged, and that waste is discouraged.

Pricing Water:
To many, the source of the freshwater management problem is the fact that unlike land-based
resources, water has historically been given a very low economic value.

Contrast water with mineral resources, for instance: if demand for a mineral is high, and if
availability is limited, then the value of the mineral in the economy will be high.

Although this does not guarantee a sustainable use of the mineral, as we saw in a different
section, it at least provides an order of magnitude of the economic value of the resource given
the service that it provides.

Fresh water, however, had historically been treated as a public good, and few efforts have been
made to determine what this value might be.

This is not a theoretical exercise: determining the resource’s value also helps put a number on
the value of its depletion or contamination, which in turn may inform the government
authorities on how to have private actors using large quantities of water for their purposes
compensate society financially.

Without such an estimate of the value of the resource for human societies, it is difficult to
establish mechanisms and arrangements to ensure its proper management.

However, there are reasons why there had been resistance to treating fresh water as a
commodity like any other: it’s essential role for survival makes all humans, without exception,
highly dependent on it.

Therefore, there has been resistance to introducing the possibility for private ownership of
water.

Experiences with the privatization of water and of its distribution utilities in the late 20 th
century, for instance, have in some cases led to backlash in populations vulnerable to price
hikes.

Taxing Water:
Nevertheless, other places around the world are at least requiring that people pay what
amounts to a tax that is proportional to the quantity that they use, using water meters installed
at commercial, industrial, or residential facilities, with the hope to encourage responsible
consumption and to provide direct funding for public expenses necessary to maintaining the
quality of and access to the resource.

The sustainable management of freshwater resources remains nevertheless a question dealt

with by local authorities in a large majority of cases.

Alternative Strategies:
Other strategies exist to ensure that freshwater is available in sufficient and reliable quantity,
especially in dry countries:
 Desalination consists of treating saline water from oceans and seas to make it suitable
for human consumption. Although it is necessary in some places, desalination remains
very energy intensive and costly.
 In other places, dams are erected to collect rainfall and store it for later consumption, as
in the Berg River Dam near Cape Town, South Africa.
Each of these strategies is necessary in countries that have a very dry climate, are prone to
droughts, and/or have significant populations.

Oceans: Defining the Problem:

Discussing oceans requires reminding ourselves of the importance of carefully defining the
problem at hand when considering governance issues related to sustainability: in this case, what
are the services provided by the oceans’ resources to human societies, and how are the latter’s
activities threatening to have an unsustainable impact on the ability to provide these services?

Oceans as a Resource:
On one level, oceans can be discussed similarly to arable land, that is, they contain a resource
suitable for human consumption, in this case fish and other sea animals.

Therefore, one fundamental sustainability issue related to oceans concerns the management of
the oceans’ capacity to renew its fish stocks.

Overfishing can result in fish stock depletion, and sometimes the complete elimination of a
certain species in different parts of the world.

Ocean Fisheries:
Ocean fisheries have long been the concern of international governance arrangements to
ensure that the resources are both equitably shared and are consumed sustainably, given their
public good aspect.

This goes back to the early arrangements such as

 The 1882 North Sea Fisheries Convention
 The 1948 Agreement on the Establishment of the Asia-Pacific Fishery Commission
 The 1949 International Convention for the Northwest Atlantic Fisheries
The UNCLOS:
Over time and in the face of many large-scale pressing issues, efforts culminated in the adoption
of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), which became effective in
1994.

It is an umbrella agreement that covers various issues pertaining to marine environmental

governance.

Notably, it established a compromise among all countries regarding what constitutes common
high seas, which is specified to be sea areas over 200 miles away from coasts, where all states
are permitted to conduct lawful activities.

A tribunal, part of the agreement, exists to arbitrate international conflicts in this regard.

Moreover, the UNCLOS led to several more specific agreements, for instance specifying caps on
fishing quantities for various species and in various regions, to ensure that stocks can renew
themselves.

Oceans and Ecosystem Services:

Oceans also provide ecosystem services, as they form an essential part of life and form part of
the carbon cycle.

For instance, the degradation for coastal and marine ecosystems threatens the physical,
economic and food security of local communities.

Moreover, oceans influence the climate and weather patterns, for instance by transferring heat
from the tropics to the polar regions.

The role of oceans in climate regulation is crucial, and they constitute an immense sink for
carbon emissions, which play a crucial role in global warming.

Oceans and Climate Change:

Concerns about the links between climate change and oceans have grown substantially, as
climate change weakens the ability of the ocean and coasts to provide critical ecosystem
services such as food, carbon storage, oxygen generation, as well as to support nature-based
solutions to climate change adaptation.

The Governance of Oceans:

The governance of oceans, whatever the specific issue considered, presents some of the worst
difficulties related to the management of public goods, as we have discussed many times in this
course.
Nevertheless, the general recognition that at least high seas, and oceans, are for the post part
outside of state territories, provides some hope regarding potential improvements in
collaborative governance for these crucial resources.

So far, however, the peace of these improvements has not matched the worsening of human
impacts on oceans.

Water Pollution:
Both fresh and saline water bodies are impacted by pollution resulting from human activities.
Several such concerns have triggered attempts at better governance:
 Water contamination with toxic chemicals: the dangers of spills of hazardous
substances in water streams came to prominence during the 1960s, as several high-
profile industrial accidents raised awareness regarding air and water pollution resulting
from industrial activities.
In the United States, for instance a piece by Time Magazine in 1969, focusing on a series
of fires in the Cuyahoga River in Ohio, caught the attention of the public, environmental
groups and even policymakers.
Spontaneous fires had become common on this river, given the high concentration of
flammable liquids, spilled or simply dumped by nearby industrial sites.
This series of similar accidents worldwide, which also included oil tanker spills, oil rig
explosions, and various other man-made disasters is largely credited in contributing to
the creation of modern governmental environmental protection agencies to regulate
environmental releases, now commonplace in many countries around the world.
In the case of large-scale water pollution, most of the attention in recent decades has
focused on oil spills, either through tanker accidents like the Exxon Valdez in 1989, or as
the result of explosions in offshore oil platforms like in the BP-Deepwater Horizon spill in
the Gulf of Mexico in 2011.
Each of these incidents, and many others, periodically raise the question of how to
design effective regulations that help drastically reduce the risks of such accidents
occurring, and that include hefty penalties for companies found at fault when an
accident occurs.
This is much easier said than done, and governance challenges remain, in part because
of the complex structure of private operations for oil extraction, which in many cases
involve various actors.
A platform, for instance, may have an owner that is different from its operator, which in
turn is different from the parent company that buys the oil that comes out of the
operation.
This complicates the legal attribution of responsibility in addition to the fact that some
of the most directly responsible actors may be much smaller ones that may lack the
financial means to even be able to pay for clean up after an accident occurs, as the BP
spill case highlighted.
  Water disposal and plastic pollution: improper waste management in landfills can also
result in contamination of water streams, either through substances leaking into
underground water or by the location of disposal sites near rivers and coasts.
Recycling is an essential part of strategies to reduce waste management problems, but
many substances remain difficult to recycle in most parts of the world.
Notably, plastic pollution has grown exponentially in recent decades, and recycling
plastic requires meeting the challenge of automating the sorting of plastic waste.
Plastic pollution has even created the problem of so-called ocean plastic patches, which
are very large buildups of plastic waste in the oceans, notably in the Pacific.
Although these patches are estimated to contain several millions of tons of debris, the
waste is far from compact, and instead is found scattered and under the surface in many
cases, complicating cleanup attempts.
Additionally, the degradation of these plastic debris makes plastic penetrate the food
chain, with often adverse complications for marine species and even human health.
This adds to concerns related to the presence of microplastics in the food chain, which
come from various applications like cosmetics or packaging.
It is worth noting, nonetheless, that around 50% of the plastic composing the ocean
plastic patches are debris from the fishing industry.

Minimizing Water Pollution:

Water contamination with toxic chemicals and waste disposal and plastic pollution represent
only a small glimpse into the various governance challenges in relation to minimizing water
pollution and ensuring the proper management of water resources.

Conclusion:
Water resources present a long list of governance challenges for human societies, due to the
special status of water as a natural resource.

Notably, freshwater is fundamental for human survival, and as such is treated as a special
commodity, different from other kinds, which complicates, at least in some cases, its sustainable
management.

Oceans, on the other hand, are overwhelmingly situated outside of countries’ national borders,
which in theory could be an advantage for finding governance arrangements, if the political
motivation and will to exist to design and implement such arrangements.

Perhaps one big unknown now is the unintended ripple-effects of modifying oceans on the
biosphere, for instance through the impacts of global warming, and on the various ecosystem
services that oceans provide and that humans use and need.

5.4: Energy
Energy End-Use Services:
Similarly, to mineral resources, we humans are in fact not interested in energy resources
themselves, but rather the service they help provide.

Several categories of energy services can be identified, for instance:

 Thermal comfort: we use electricity or fuel to produce heating during winter times or
cooling in the summer.
 Transport: we use gasoline or electricity to power a car, bus, or subway to move around.
 Lighting: we use electricity or kerosine to light lamps and be less dependent on sunlight.
 Hygiene/cooking: we use electricity and natural gas for appliances or to heat water.
 Structure: we use energy to produce high levels of heat to transform raw materials into a
version and form that can be useful to build infrastructure like houses and bridges.
 Etc.

To be able to obtain these services, energy sources must be transformed or converted first:
 For instance, we transform crude oil into refined fuels like gasoline, which we then burn
in internal combustion engines in vehicles to move around.
 We burn coal to produce electricity, which we then use to power the lights in homes and
offices.
 We convert the sun’s radiation into electricity or heat for the same reasons.

Energy: From Resources to Services – Example 1:

So, we can consider a few possible pathways from the energy resource to our end-use of the
service it provides. Let’s look at two examples: steel rods used for construction and personal
transport.

In the production of steel rods, plants need energy to heat up the steel and purify it so that it is
strengthened and bend it to obtain the shape desired. This requires a very large quantity of
heat, which is provided by burning a fuel, likely either coal or natural gas. Thus, to obtain the
final service of structure, I need to mine coal from the ground, transport it to the industrial site,
and burn it in furnaces. I could complete similar steps by burning natural gas instead.

Example 2:
In the second example of personal transport, the service I require is to be able to move around
faster and perhaps more conveniently than by foot or bike. Imagine I choose to use a personal
vehicle to do this. If this car works on gasoline, it means that to have it move me around, I need
oil to be extracted from the ground, then refined into gasoline, which then needs to be
distributed to gas stations where I fill up my tank, and then my car burns it.

If instead I use an electric car, things may be different, because I don’t need the fuel, but instead
I can rely on electricity, regardless of how it is produced.
The electricity I use can come from coal or natural gas that is burned in power plants, from a
nuclear power plant, from a hydroelectric dam, from wind turbines, or solar panels for instance.
The electricity also needs to be transported from its site of production, typically through high-
voltage transmission lines, to where I need to change my car, for instance at home.

Sustainability Issues:
What these two examples tell is us that there may be various issues linked to energy
production, transport, and consumption when thinking about sustainability.

A first set of issues is like those of other natural resources, especially minerals, and concerns the
depletion of reserves of non-renewable sources, like coal, oil, and natural gas.

Another set of issues relates to the pollution and biodiversity impacts associated with
production, transport, and use: each of these activities may involve the release of air and water
pollutants including greenhouse gasses or pipeline and tanker spills or may transform landscape
and destroy natural habitats.

Similarly, extracting oil and natural gas from underground or underwater sites, notably, involves
a transformation of the landscape, risks of polluting the air and nearby water streams, an
impact on biodiversity in extraction sites, and a significant quantity of water and energy to
operate. In this latter case, the use of energy in the extraction of energy resources is somewhat
ironic, as we require a large amount of energy to extract resources from the ground that will
provide us with … energy.

Fostering Renewable Energy:

A primary motivation for policy makers and private actors alike for the past few decades has
been to find ways to replace a significant portion of the global energy supply by renewable
sources.

These include hydroelectricity large and small, wind energy, solar energy, geothermal energy, as
well as some forms of biomass.

The benefits of using these sources are multiple and include significantly lower air pollution and
greenhouse gas emissions compared to their fossil fuel alternatives.

In fact, energy-related emissions represent more than three quarters of world GHG emissions.

The rationale has been straightforward:

Renewable energy technologies were seen as more expensive because of their small market
share and relatively small number of actors.

However, economies of scale and innovation would lead prices to drop to a level where these
forms of energy would be competitive with fossil fuels, if only renewable energy technologies
would gain a large enough market share.
Therefore, this represents a case of market barrier, and government intervention is seen as
required to allow the takeoff of renewable energy, which would eventually be able to perform
economically on their own.

 Overview: There are various policy instruments that states have used in the past to
break this barrier, and most of them had objectives outside of the simple fostering of
renewable energy sources: many such policies involve the creation of green jobs, both
through direct support for the industry and through the provision of a favourable and
stable investment context for renewable energies that were emerging at the time.
 Feed-In Tariffs (FITs): FITs are publicly guaranteed contracts that provide some
renewable electricity producers with a fixed revenue, for a given period, above the
market rate. To resolve the market barrier, the FIT acts as an artificial (and temporary)
driver for the necessary expansion, which then works to eliminate the barrier.
 Renewable Portfolio Standards (RPS): RPS function directly: utilities are forced by
regulation to obtain a given percentage of their load from renewable sources, and the
percentage increases over time. The main benefit (over FITs) is the flexibility allowed to
the utilities in meeting these standards, in other words it is private actors specialized in
the domain that choose the most efficient ways of meeting the standards.
 Carbon Pricing: carbon emissions can be targeted by government intervention to put a
price on the negative externality that is the emission of greenhouse gases. In this type of
instrument, governments force private actors to pay a cost for each ton of greenhouse
gas produced by their activities, to provide them with an incentive to innovate and
reduce emissions.
Carbon pricing can be done through a tax on emissions, or through the establishment of
a stock exchange for permits to emit them: if you are an actor holding permits to emit a
certain quantity of GHGs, but your innovation makes you have a few unused permits,
you can sell them on this market to other actors that may not be holding enough
permits.
 Low-Emission Vehicle Support (Electric cars): since the transport sector remains
perhaps the most difficult one to transform and see a penetration of renewable
energies, specific attention if provided by governments to encourage the adoption of
zero-emission vehicles, often electric cars.
The policy instruments used for these purposes are cash rebates for low-emission
vehicles, which you get when you purchase an electric car, for instance, or zero-emission
vehicle norms, which force car retailers and manufacturers to sell a certain share of zero-
emission vehicles, which grows over time.
All these policies and instruments have become common place since the turn of the century
and have contributed to a growing share of renewables in the global energy mix, mainly through
an important decrease in the price of these technologies. Fossil fuels continue to dominate.
Improving Access to Electricity in Low-Income Regions:
Expanding electricity access to low-income regions of the world has been a concern for
development policy for quite some time, as lack of access to electricity infrastructure in many
regions of the world is liked to lower quality of life because of its impact on health, economic
development, or education.
For instance, in low-income regions, the fuels used for cooking may be biomass collected from
the surrounding areas, which requires people to move several hours per day just to collect the
wood, preventing them from using this time for more productive or fulfilling activities: it also is
burned in unsafe home installations leading to respiratory problems due to the smoke.

Moreover, the lack of electricity and the difficulty of getting fuel for fire makes lighting at night a
luxury, affecting all activities at night including education related (for study and homework).
What these examples point out is that for some populations in low-income regions at least,
access to affordable and reliable electricity infrastructure has long been seen as a contributing
factor in perspectives for raising quality of life.

These reflections have been bolstered in recent years by the realization that ensuring a more
sustainable use of energy for a vast majority of services would require an increase in electricity
demand.

This is because new energy demand and the transformation of existing demand for fossil fuels
into a more sustainable system demands at least a more important use of electricity, for
instance to replace gasoline-powered cars by their electric counterparts, heating with oil by
heating with electricity, and so on. Of course, this only works in improving sustainability if the
electricity comes from renewable sources, but in theory this type of transformation would lead
to a significant reduction of greenhouse gas emissions.

For these reasons, expanding access to clean energy, particularly renewable sources of
electricity, has made it to goal #7 in the Sustainable Development Goals Agenda.

Regional discrepancies in access to electricity are strongly correlated with development levels.
For instance, countries that are members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and
Development (OECD), which roughly correspond to high-income countries, have a near 100% of
their population that has access to reliable electricity infrastructure.

Contrast that with the region with the lowest average income, Sub-Saharan Africa, which has an
average penetration rate of a little over 40%.

There are two observations to point out here:

 This still represents a more than doubling for the region over a 20-year period, which
shows the extent to which this issue is seen as important by various actors including the
population itself.
 Regional averages must be treated with care: Sub-Saharan Africa is a very large region,
and some countries do much better than others. Using the average for the region thus
understates the problem for many regions where well under 10% of the population has
access to these infrastructures.

We can also look at one other distinction, that between rural populations and urban
populations.

Although urban populations have a long way to go for full coverage, it is nearing 80%, while
rural regions have a more modest 23% of the population with access to electricity.

As a result, the challenge to electrify many communities in low-income regions is substantial

and does indeed represent a key component of sustainable development efforts.

Traditionally, expanding electricity access in rural regions was very costly and tedious because it
requires the building of transmission lines across very large regions, which then needed to be
maintained even in areas where access to the line was difficult.

More recently, with the rapid expansion and price decrease in smaller scale electricity
generation technologies like solar panels and wind turbines, other options can now be
considered.

The first is the construction and setup of smaller distribution networks, for instance at the
community level.

Given that wind turbines or solar panels can be deployed at very small scales, electrification of
communities using these technologies does not require the construction of large and costly
power plants that provide for an entire region:
Smaller installations can be tailored to each community, removing the need to connect the
network to a regional supplier.

This is limited, of course, by the capacity for the installations to produce electricity at the right
times, given that wind and solar energy are intermittent, that is, they produce electricity only
when the wind is blowing, and the sun is shining. This has long been a challenge to integrating
these sources in the electricity mix, even in high-income countries.

This leads us to the second promising development, which is the continuous drop in the prices
for large scale storage technologies, in other words, batteries that are able to hold the power
produced by wind or solar energy and supply it when the turbines and panels are not
producing.

These two developments hold promise for the future of rural electrification in low-income
countries, as they make it more likely that we will see the widespread use of mini-grid systems.

With the integration of storage technologies, it would thus be possible to have independent
renewable electricity mini grids at the village level that could provide reliably and continuously
electricity for communities of various sizes. Storage technologies remain expensive for now, but
with their broad adoption around the world, prices could drop to levels that would enable these
mini-grid arrangements to solve the electrification challenge or even low-income, remote
regions around the world.

Conclusion:
Energy systems present sustainability challenges that include, but also go beyond, activities
related to production, transport, and consumption.

Public authorities around the world have put the management of energy systems at the center
of sustainability-related policies.

Sustainable energy systems are also seen as key components of global goals to improve quality
of life around the world.

Lesson 6: Conflict, Environmental Justice, and Resistance

6.1: Conflict, Natural Resources, and the Environment

Introduction:
Social and political tensions sometimes lead to unaddressed grievances, political clashes,
refugees, armed conflict, etc.

The question we ask in this first section is, what are the ways through which sustainability and
environmental concerns may create or exacerbate these difficulties?

We look at three categories of such factors:

1. Environmental Stresses
2. Climate Change
3. Natural Resources
 1. Environmental Stresses and Social Tensions:
How do environmental stresses combine with other social tensions to produce conflict?

In this context, environmental stresses refer to abrupt or progressive changes in environmental

factors that result in an added or new pressure on social groups.

For instance, a severe heat wave may lead to a drought, which in turn may produce a shortage
of water supply in a given region, making it difficult for inhabitants to ensure an adequate
supply of freshwater.

Unsustainable practices are linked to these concerns, as by definition they imply some
worsening of environmental conditions, which in many cases results in a stress strong enough to
put pressure on a social group. In the previous example, for instance, the depletion of local
water supply linked with industrial activity may exacerbate the effects of the drought.

There are various other reasons contributing to the pressure in the previous example, of course:
the quality of political and economic institutions, for instance, may temper the impacts of such
a drought.

For instance, the national government may be able to react to a drought in a given region of the
country by organizing a redistribution of emergency water resources for a temporary period,
and then invest in new infrastructure to ensure that the impact of future droughts will be more
contained.

This is what we see in high-income countries most of the time, when authorities and social
organization lead to at least a partly effective response to the crisis.

However, even this simple example already points to some concerns:

 One is that political institutions are not always developed enough to provide this
tempering force, may not have sufficient resources to implement such efforts, or may be
plagued by corruption.
 Another possibility is that ethnic tensions in the country leave the population impacted
by the drought without an influential voice in political institutions, and as a result they
will not be helped or at least will not be prioritized. This could in turn exacerbate ethnic
tensions in the country, and lead to or worsen other difficulties.
In other words, it is relatively easy to imagine that in certain political and social situations,
environmental stresses and unsustainable practices have implications for grievances of all kinds:
they can worsen situations where other grievances are not addressed properly by the political
system, and so on.

Research on environmental stresses has uncovered many such dynamics and links, bringing out
two main aspects of environmental stresses:
I. The incapacity of social groups to cope with a particular stress, be it punctual like a
natural disaster or longer-term like the erosion of arable land in a region.
 II. The possibility that this incapacity leads to political tensions, and even armed
conflict.

Linkages:
In some cases, environmental stresses or scarcity occur and are followed by a given population
of victims not being able to adjust and adapt.

Many stresses can produce this situation: a natural disaster that destroys infrastructure and/or
food supplies, a long-term degradation of renewable resources like arable land or freshwater,
and so on.

In this situation, if political institutions are not able or not willing to help the population
affected, conflict may erupt within this population for access to the limited resources remaining,
or migration movements may begin as some groups in the population have no choice but to
leave their home to find a more suitable place to live.

As a result, the original stress leads to other social difficulties, creating environmental refugees
that will knock on the door of neighbouring regions for help and relocation. Given that
migration movements move slowly, they will need to be managed by neighbouring regions,
which may not have the capacity to manage the inflow of people coming in or the resources to
ensure their safety.

Depletion of Natural Resources:

The second aspect to the social impacts of environmental stresses is that some of these
developments may ultimately lead to more serious conflict, as the environmental stresses are
neither a sufficient nor a necessary cause for conflict, they end up being, most of the time,
contributing factors that exacerbate or compound other political, social, or economic
difficulties.
Of course, it should also be mentioned that armed conflict itself feeds these dynamics by
producing and reproducing several environmental stresses, for instance through ecological
destruction due to the fighting, and by reducing the societal capacities to cope with these
stresses, as infrastructure and institutions may be destroyed during the conflict as well.

2. Climate Change:
We can certainly imagine potential links between the growing impact that climate change has
on the Earth’s climate and some of the environmental stresses discussed earlier.

For instance, climate change is participating in increasing the frequency and severity of extreme
weather-related events, and global warming leads to higher temperatures in some regions,
resulting in a higher likelihood of droughts or water scarcity.

For good reasons, then, researchers have been postulating the mechanisms through which
climate change impacts social and political dynamics and have documented the evidence we
already have of these impacts.
We can identify three areas of study in the research on climate change and its social impacts.

 The first area of study details the security threats and risks following from climate
change related events. This is the logical extension to the discussion we had earlier, in
other words climate change is seen here as a threat multiplier, increasing the likelihood
of socially damaging environmental stresses.

The additional environmental stresses brought about by climate change are numerous,
notably a modification in precipitation patterns, a rise in sea levels, and a multiplication
of exceptional weather events leading to habitat and infrastructure destruction,
especially in regions where these are already scarce or fragile.

Research here thus concentrates on the destabilising effects of climate change, on the
management of security risks and threats that follow, and on responses necessary to
prevent humanitarian crises and armed conflict. It has even led to the use of the term
climate refugees, which result from forced migration movements following climate
change related environmental pressure.

The early conclusions point out what is somewhat obvious: this is a growing global
threat, indeed. At the same time, many authors insist on pointing out that the climate
factor cannot on its own explain security tensions, which brings us back to the
importance of governance efforts to better manage the sustainability of humans’
relationship with the Earth’s resources.
 The second problem area studied by the literature on climate change looks at answers to
provide to related environmental stresses.

This literature describes the strategic reflection, the operational challenges related to
crisis management, and the reflection in terms of the capacity of various institutions
(including military forces).

There is growing recognition, for instance, in military institutions of the importance to

integrate climate related notions in the strategic and operational reflection over how to
manage interventions.
 A third literature looks at the consequences for international security following climate
change adaptation strategies and policy. In other words, what are the consequences for
international security of policies that are and will be developed by states or other actors
to face challenges imposed by climate change?

There is a substantial international effort to establish governance arrangements to

manage and, if possible, limit climate change, from transforming economies to reduce
greenhouse gas emissions to providing financial assistance to developing countries to
adapt to its worst impacts.
 Authors in this literature give attention to the fact that these policies cannot be
considered socially neutral and without risks, despite the best of intentions.

For instance, for the past 20 years the international community, led by the US, the EU,
and Brazil, has pushed hard for the expansion of the production and use of biofuels for
transport.

Given that transport is a sector where it seems very difficult to move away from gasoline
and diesel, this seems like an improvement in terms of reducing GHG emissions.

However, the spectacular increase in the consumption of biofuels worldwide has led to
an important increase in demand for land to grow crops that serve to produce the fuel.

Even beyond the issue of competition for scarce land to grow food crops instead, this
situation has led some multinationals and some countries to aggressively try to acquire
land around the world to convert to biofuels production, a phenomenon often called
land grabs.

Therefore, what seemed like a sensible climate change reducing strategy has security
implications as well, as competition for land and land grabs lead to increased grievances
from local populations.

A more far-fetched, although still realistic, possibility is the increased likelihood for
conflict if the international community gets more serious with acting on climate change
or the protection of biodiversity.

If many countries strongly disagree with the actions of a given country, for instance is
the latter acts insufficiently to reduce its emissions or fails to protect its forests, a
decision to force the country to comply through economic sanctions or even military
action could be considered.

3. Natural Resources, Under-Development and Conflict:

So far in this overview, we have focused on environmental stresses, a broad category that
includes many very different phenomena.

It is worth giving more attention to the specific case of resources, but not in terms of
scarcity, as we have talked about so far.

Rather, the presence of valuable resources can sometimes lead to social problems, including
armed conflict.

Although the notion that countries with abundant resources sometimes ran into trouble
when trying to convert this abundance into wealth is not new, the term resource curse and
the contemporary interest in the phenomenon dates back only to the 1990s.
The resource curse, sometimes called the paradox of plenty, refers to the paradox that
countries with plentiful valuable resources often present worse economic, political, and
social outcomes than similar countries without such abundance, for instance lower
economic growth and development, less democracy, under-developed political institutions,
and more conflict.

This is a paradox, as we could normally expect a boon in resources to be a welcome

development, as it provides a large influx of revenues for a country, either through its
government of for society, or both.

However, in resource curse situation, the presence of the resource leads to a bulk of
immediate or potential revenues, which in turn reinforce negative dynamics.

There are many reasons uncovered by this literature for this link between resource
abundance and development outcomes, which we can group into two categories:
I. Resource rent and democracy/institutions:
This is a link between the resource revenues and democracy or political institutions
more generally.

Most studies looking at this link have focused on oil resources.

One mechanism, for instance, is that oil revenues reinforce the undemocratic regime
governing the country, slowing its transition towards democracy.

The presence of oil provides a large source of revenue to the government, which
typically gives concession rights to a foreign company to extract and sell the oil, and
then collects a share of this revenue directly.

The problem is that because of this, the government does not depend on its
population for financial support (through income taxes, for instance), and therefore
feels less pressure to be accountable in its decisions, in other words, it feels less
pressure to democratize.

The leaders in power can even use the revenue to buy off potential opposition
challengers, or to implement modest social programs in regions where opposition to
the regime may be brewing.

In this first mechanism, then, the oil revenues participate in weakening the link
between the government and the population it governs, slowing down or impeding
the democratization of political institutions.
II. Resources and armed conflict:
Studies and cases are more diverse than merely oil resources, although these are still
important.
 Several cases present instances of such a link:
 Use of force: the presence of a resource deposit in a given region may lead government
leaders to forcibly displace the population present on site for the extraction to proceeds,
leading to a multiplication of grievances from population forcibly displaced that are not
addressed by government institutions.

This may lead to the formation of rebel groups, increasing the likelihood for conflict with
state forces, and even civil law.
 Marginalization: the presence of economically or politically marginalized populations on
the site of resource extraction can also facilitate support to a guerilla or independence
movement.

Most secessionist movements have a historical background independent of the presence

of the resource, but the socio-economic changes associated with the resource’s
extraction can reinforce support for the movement.
 Rebel groups: the presence of resource deposits in each region can also provide an
opportunity for a rebel group to exploit it on its own and gain a financial, and eventually
military advantage on state forces, for instance by buying arms with the revenues.
 Foreign forces: the location of resource deposits can help facilitate the participation of
foreign forces in an existing conflict, where these foreign actors, for various political
reasons, may see it as in their advantage to support and encourage rebel forces to
exploit the resource.
 Location: note that in these studies of the link between resources and conflict, the
location of the resource is important: geographically concentrated and circumscribed
deposits or reserves, for instance, may combine with ethnic divisions or other social
tensions, and increase the risk of conflict.

Conclusion:
A growing body of evidence is making the many postulated links between environmental
stresses, resources scarcity and abundance, and conflict and underdevelopment clearer.

Some key takeaways so far:

 Environmental stresses combine with other tensions to result in negative political and
social outcomes.
 Climate change acts both as a threat multiplier and as a new topic of interest for security
studies and policy.
 Bountiful resources, oil, participate in increasing the likelihood for political conflict in a
wide variety of ways.
All of these dynamics point to the importance of proper governance institutions to temper the
creation of the vicious circles that result.

6.2: Environmental Justice Concerns:

Introduction:
Beginning in the 1960s but really taking off in the 1980s, various movements around the world
started to bring up environmental justice issues that were produced by the accelerating
economic globalization. Often associated with alternative globalization movements, social
movements focused on environmental injustice documented and pointed out the inequality
brought by what they saw as the specific form of neoliberal economic globalization that was
taking place, which tended to subordinate social or environmental concerns to private capital
and markets.

To overview these concerns and arguments, we proceed in this section by organizing the
discussion into three themes:
1. The concepts of food security and food sovereignty:
Food security “exists when all people, at all times, have physical and economic access to
sufficient, safe, and nutritious food to meet their dietary needs and food preferences for
an active and healthy life.”

Food security has been the main concept guiding thinking about the global food supply
and access issues since the 1970s, and most major international development
institutions have put food security at the center of their policy reflection over this
period.

Despite a spectacular expansion in food supply in the 1960s and 1970s following a
transformation of agricultural practices and organization around the world, and
especially in developing countries, concerns have since intensified following a continued
rise in food practices.
For starters, the liberalization of agriculture in the 1980s led to a reduction of subsidies
to agriculture and reduction in trade barriers to food imports in developing countries, in
exchange for financial support from either the IMF or World Bank, or both.

However, similar reductions in subsidies to the agricultural sector were not implemented
in developed countries.

As a result of this and other economic developments, local producers in developing

countries often could not compete with food imports in their own country that came
from OECD countries.

This process was further consolidated through the creation of the World Trade
Organization in 1995.

No further negotiations on trade produced any change since.

Even outside of these trade-related concerns, the increase in worries about global food
security can be explained by a rising population but many issues also contribute to
exacerbating these concerns: desertification, deforestation, the collapse of fisheries, the
demand for biofuels which displace food crops, the use of oil by-products in the growth
cycle which ties food to volatile oil prices, the use of vegetation to feed high-end farm
animals to produce beef and pork, are all factors that have grown in importance over the
past few decades, as we have seen elsewhere in the course, and which participate in
increasing food prices as well.

Therefore, food security concerns have only grown stronger more recently, and some
purported solutions are not convincing to many: genetically modified organisms (GMOs),
for instance, are often touted as possible technological solutions, but they are politically
contested and suggest a continuation of problematic use of land resources like
monocropping.

Other technological solutions that would create a new “green revolution” such as the
one that occurred in the 1960s raise far of displacing millions of farmers, and more
importantly would further organize agriculture into an industrial system that brings
severe concerns over equality of access.

It is essential to note that throughout all of these impacts, not all populations are
affected equally, as changes in food prices, for instance, affect poorer populations more
significantly because they tend to spend a larger portion of their income on food.

Some see the solution as lying beyond conventional industrial agriculture in more
localised and small-scale agricultural systems.

Critics of the mainstream food security agenda, for instance, see it as misguided
attempts to reduce hunger and increase food production without reforming the woes of
the existing model of agriculture. These critics converge around demands for “food
sovereignty”: ‘the right of peoples to healthy and culturally appropriate food, produced
through ecologically sound and sustainable methods, and their right to define their own
food and agricultural systems’.

Food sovereignty would represent a fundamental shift in how agriculture is organized

around the world because it implies a recognition that food and farming are culturally
important and not just commodities to be produced in industrially rational ways.

Whereas food security rests on the four pillars of availability, access, utilization, and
stability, the Nyéléni Declaration of 2007 outlined the six pillars of food sovereignty.
I. It focuses on food for people: people’s right to sufficient, healthy, and culturally
appropriate food is at the centre of policies; and food is recognized as more than
just a commodity.
II. It values food providers the livelihoods of all producers is supported, respected,
and valued.
III. It localises food systems: the distance between food providers and consumers is
reduced; local food providers are protected from food aid dumping; consumers
 are protected from poor-quality food and GMOs; and the power of remote and
unaccountable corporations is resisted.
IV. It put control locally: control over land and resources is placed in the hands of
local food providers; geopolitical borders do not erode the rights of local
communities to inhabit their territories; and the privatisation of ‘natural
resources’ is rejected.
V. It builds knowledge and skills: food systems are conserved based on local skills
and knowledge; research systems are developed to build knowledge and skills
and pass these on to future generations.
VI. It works with nature: the contributions of ecosystem services are maximised to
improve resilience and adaptation to climate change; also, energy-intensive,
monocultural, industrialized production methods are rejected.
Therefore, this illustrated the clash between the two approaches, which give different
importance to the issue of supply.

Critics of food sovereignty also point out some problems with the approach, notably the
emphasis on small-scale agriculture in developing countries, which they point out is not
necessarily a freely chosen lifestyle. We delve deeper into these arguments in a different
session.
2. The correlation between low-income populations and exposure to environmental
hazards:
The development and maturing of thinking on these issues, and advocating for their
correction, relates to the concept of environmental justice.

Environmental justice refers to policies and practices that aim to both detect the
existence of environmental inequities such as those described before and help correct
them and prevent them in the future.

Furthermore, environmental justice implies that efforts are made to uncover the reasons
behind the inequities, so that environmental risks and benefits are comparable across all
populations and groups.

In the US, for instance, environmental justice was focused at first on air and water
pollution, and how the impacts and costs of problems were not shared equally by all.

Eventually, research in the 1990s documented many other instances of environmental

inequities, linked to hazardous waste dumps, municipal landfills, emissions from
chemical plants, the siting of nuclear waste sites, the nature and extent of occupational
hazards to which workers were exposed, the planning of transit systems and highways,
and unfortunately many others.

What was discovered was a plethora of cases that showed a correspondence between
certain socio-demographic characteristics and the degree of exposure to environmental
hazards: in other words, populations presenting certain characteristics, most of the time
 low-income and often African American, were much more likely to be exposed to
environmental hazards than other groups in the population.

The reasons behind these inequities are highly contested, and range from unintended
consequences of economic logic, notably because of the lower price of property in
regions surrounding the hazard or risk’s source, to intentional policy or lack or regulation
enforcement, sometimes because of racism.

Early high-profile cases ended up contributing to raising awareness about environmental

inequities.

For instance, the siting of a smelter in West Dallas, Texas next to a poor, predominantly
African American community, led to emissions of lead across the homes of community
dwellers significantly above levels safe for human health.

Despite existing regulation on such emissions, lack of enforcement by local authorities

led to children presenting much higher blood levels of lead than children in other
communities.

After years of unsuccessful resistance from the community members to have the
regulations enforced, the State of Texas and the city of Dallas sued the owner of the
smelter, who settled out of court and agreed to clean up soil in the area.

In a civil case settlement, the company also agreed to pay $45 million to children
affected by the emissions.

Other such cases across the US led the issue to eventually reach the national
government agenda, where President Clinton issued Executive Order 12898 in 1994 to
create the Office of Environmental Protection Agency as well as the National
Environmental Justice Advisory Council.

The creation of these two instances resulted in mechanisms and financial support to
create research programs and regular meetings and hearings to discuss environmental
justice issues, formalizing the importance of these concerns within the national
government.

The Executive Order legally binds federal agencies to develop strategies for
implementing environmental justice and provide minority and low-income communities
access to public information and public participation.
3. The globalization of environmental injustice:
A similar pattern of inequality in the exposure to environmental hazards has emerged on
an international scale over recent decades.
 Given that raw materials and waste products are traded more freely around the world,
and given that global supply chains are more common, processing operations moves
more easily around the world and reproduces many of the aspects discussed earlier for
the US.

The main concern is straightforward and follows the same logic as the US environmental
justice movement put forward: on an international scale, there is a pattern of high-
income countries and powerful corporate actors, through the action of both
governments and corporations, treating low-income countries as preferred sites for
highly polluting activities or waste dumping.

This is not just a question of level of income: much like the cases within the US
illustrated, the populations worldwide which end up being more exposed to
environmental hazards following from commercial and industrial activities are those
with less of a voice in political processes.

There is indeed support for that claim: the strengthening of environmental regulations in
some countries, for instance, has led some multinationals to transfer operations
associated with important and unsafe environmental releases to countries with no such
regulations in place, often with the complicity of the host country’s government.

The high levels of air and water pollution affect the livelihood and health of populations
near the production sites, and particularly in the case of water pollution by toxic waste
dumping, which can destroy plant and animal life in entire regions.
This is an addition to the trade of toxic waste to developing countries lacking the
facilities to process or recycle them, which similarly presents this type of justice
concerns.

Moreover, some international environmental justice issues result from sustainable

development policies: for instance, the drive to expand the share of the global energy
supply that comes from renewable sources has led to several megaprojects, notably
large-scale hydroelectric dams, or wind farms, which lead to concerns regarding
population displacement for the projects to be realized.

Without specific attention paid to environmental justice concerns, these projects

proceed with an exacerbation of social injustice, typically directed toward already
marginalized communities and groups.

Conclusion:
The concerns surrounding food security and sovereignty, which form one of the key
sustainability governance issues requiring human societies to find governance arrangements,
illustrate the clash between the focus on supply and a more fundamental rethinking of food-
related activities around the world.
Broader thinking and research on environmental justice also demonstrate the need to find
governance arrangements, whether through policy or other concerted action, that meet global
sustainability objectives while improving fairness through a reduction in environmental
inequities.

6.3: Case Study: Alternative Farming

Alternative Farming and the Organization of Food Production:

In this section we look at efforts and debates over how to manage food production sustainably.
This case presents several points of contention among actors involved in the sector, but also
among visions of how agriculture should be organized both locally and at the global level, in
effect taking position over the relationship between humans, land, and food.

1. Problem Definition and Formal Agenda: let’s begin with the definition of the problem.
Agriculture and food are associated with various sustainability problems, but here we
consider the discussion of the system.

Given that there are many strong advocates for change and reforms in this system – and
even, as we shall see, of a complete overhaul – it seems obvious that fundamental
problems are identified by actors that go beyond the more specific sustainability worries
following land erosion or monocropping, for instance.

However, these problems are still part of the discussion, integrated into broader visions
of the impacts of how the food system is organized globally.
 History: over the course of the 20th century, agriculture and food production
underwent major transformations in most parts of the world, as a result of a
combination of science and technology, and a gradual industrialization of the
activities it entails.
 Modern Machinery: first, the advent of modern machinery, in addition to cheap
fossil fuels to power it, led to the penetration of a logic of industrialism in many
countries during the first half of the 20th century.
In the US, for instance, the number of farms almost doubled over the course of
the century, and the vast majority were now large, i.e., at least 500 acres.
Small scale farming was now seen as inefficient, and the very importance of this
aspect illustrated both concerns about food supply and the domination of an
economic logic in the farming sector.
 Green Revolution: second, in the 1960s and 1970s a series of developments in
low-income countries came to be known as the Green Revolution.
The multiplication of large-scale famines and a rapidly growing world population
led to major worries about global food security, and international private
foundations cooperated with aid agencies to supply farmers in developing
countries with high-yielding varieties of seeds and financed the spreading of
mechanized equipment.
  Results: the results in terms of yield improvements are beyond dispute: the
production of rice in India, for instance, quadrupled by the end of the century.
But concerns were rapidly raised in relation to the negative environmental and
social costs of this revolution.
Critics pointed out that: modern agricultural techniques led to soil degradation,
depleted water resources, diminished diversity, and damaged ecosystems.

Proponents of the green revolution argue that without these improvements, population growth
alone would have forced countries like India to expand drastically the area under cultivation by
cutting more trees, destroying more wildlife habitat, and plowing up more fragile sloping on
dryland soils.

This illustrates, as we have discussed in many parts of this course, how most sustainability
challenges cannot be discussed in isolation from other demographic, social and political factors.
But there is more to the critique.

Alongside the green revolution occurred a “chemicalization” of agriculture, following an

aggressive and multidecade campaign by chemical companies to convince of the necessity to
apply large quantities of chemical fertilizers, herbicides, and pesticides.

Although some of these products like DDT, were eventually banned due to their impact on the
environment, overwhelmingly they became part of the default technique in large-scale
agriculture around the world with critical and worsening impacts on the environment and on
the sustainability of agriculture.

Most of these developments were pushed not only by economic interest, but also by a belief
that more food production is a key objective for human societies to achieve, both because of
the combination of the fixed quantity of arable land available and a rapidly growing population,
and of an intent to keep food prices low so that it remains affordable to all populations around
the world, including the poorest.

The “problem” of food, therefore, is one corresponding to the food security concept: ensuring
affordable, sufficient, and equitable access to food for all everywhere.

2. Actors and Groups and Their Positions: the food security framework has led to various
proposals for improvements to the world’s food production, notably a spread of
technological innovation to developing countries to increase yields, a restructuring of
food production in more efficient ways in regions where it is insufficient, and efforts to
ensure that producing regions in developing countries are supported financially to allow
farmers’ integration into regional and world markets.

This last point is often at the forefront of development policy, as the theoretical benefits
are multiple: enabling small-scale farmers to integrate markets would increase their
prospects for revenues and raise standards of living, while helping them acquire the
means to improve the effectiveness and resilience of their operations in the face of
stresses like bad weather or a changing climate.

It would also lead to increased global food security, as these improvements would
overall increase both the quantity of food available, and the means of a large part of the
population to access it.

There certainly is support for that thinking from international institutions that work on
ensuring food security on the longer term, notably the Food and Agriculture
Organization, a specialized United Nations agency involved in global efforts to defeat
hunger, or the World Bank, which designs and implements development projects that try
to raise standards of living in low-income regions.

For partly different reasons, this thinking is supported by large agrochemical companies,
which promote the use of chemical and genetically engineered solutions.

Although the use of genetically modified crops is highly contested in many regions of the
world, it remains discussed as a potentially unavoidable means to increasing crop yields
in the future.

In terms of regional distinctions, it is more difficult to draw a clear distinction between,

for instance, developed and developing countries on these issues, at least not from their
representatives.

Notwithstanding the agricultural trade-related tensions we discussed elsewhere in this

lesson, most developed countries support the efforts to increase food security, although
there is wide disagreements over the role that should be played by key solutions like
GMOs.

As for developing countries, some state leaders like Bolivia have been much more critical
of the social organization of the world food system, while many others welcome
assistance from international agencies to accelerate development through modern
farming techniques and integration of isolated farming communities into regional
markets.

Now for critics:

As describes in the discussion over the definition of the problem, opponents of the
business as usual proposed in most food security efforts point out that there are, in
addition to obvious environmental concerns linked to modern agricultural systems,
many dire social impacts.

To a large extent these concerns are embedded in demands for food sovereignty, which
requires a transformation of this existing model.
 As we saw in an earlier section, food sovereignty implies “the right of peoples to healthy
and culturally appropriate food, produced through ecologically sound and sustainable
methods, and their right to define their own food and agricultural systems”, as well as a
change in national and international policies to protect this right.

This view of production highlights the highly cultural nature of food’s role in
communities, and the fact that political power for decisions linked to food production,
distribution and consumption have largely been taken away from communities, because
of the organization of global food markets.

In this sense, the current system is the continuation of past inequitable systems of land
ownership, and the largely negative environmental impacts of the food system are the
inevitable side effect of this disconnect between people and food production.

Therefore, a fundamental aspect in the discussion about making food production and
consumption more sustainable is social justice and an alignment of local values with the
organization of food systems around the world.

3. Institutions, Norms, and Current Practices: in most of the world, policies to protect food
sovereignty would represent a drastic departure from these practices, because it would
require restricting farm sizes, ensure equitable access to land, water, and seeds with
different application of intellectual property rights, and significant public support for
agricultural rural communities.

The group that has managed to advance this discussion the farthest is La Via Campesina,
a transnational network of farming and peasant organizations in 81 countries.

Formed in 1996, the group organizes summits presenting alternatives to governmental

meetings and issues parallel declarations on sustainable agriculture, typically calling for
an overhaul of international trade rules that affect farmers, including above all the
removal of food from WTO jurisdiction.

Some states have followed these principles and tried to formalize them.

Ecuador, for instance, amended its constitution in 2008 to include food sovereignty, and
now the state is obligated to promote food sovereignty, as its Article 13 now pledges
that people will have permanent access to sufficient healthy, and nutritious food
preferably produced locally in accordance with cultural customs.

Other groups have pursued food sovereignty objectives without the help of
governments.

In Brazil, for instance, the Landless Rural Workers Movement (or MST from its
Portuguese acronym) is one of the largest member organizations of La Via Campesina.
 The MST has actively rejected what is sees as unjust land laws in Brazil, organizing
thousands of non-violent occupations on unproductive land that is owned by large
landowners.

The MST has also made sustainable agriculture central to its mission, establishing several
schools and training courses to train youth in sustainable farming techniques.

4. Objectives and Effectiveness of Governance Arrangements: as for so many things, but

perhaps especially in this case, sustainability objectives interact with many other social
concerns, which may or may not be helping with ensuring a sustainable use of land
resources to obtain food.

Moreover, here again assessing effectiveness depends fundamentally on what no one

sees as the main problems to resolve, and the general vision of the solutions to
prioritize.

For instance, if it’s a question of producing more to feed a growing population, while
reducing environmental harm and improving the sustainability of the practices, then
several proposals are made:
Genetic engineering or manipulation, which involves combining the genes of biologically
distinct products, such as plants and bacteria, is an important avenue to pursue for many
actors.

This produces “transgenic” crops with characteristics such as tolerance to herbicides,

disease, insects, and biological stresses (drought, poor and acidic soil, etc..), which
increases yields and provides more resilient production in some circumstances.

However, corporate actors have used these techniques to protect their intellectual
property by ensuring that the seeds are sterile and only activated by a specific chemical
fertilizer.

Therefore, there are worries, many unfortunately supported by empirical cases since the
green revolution, that this completely tramples the right of people to use their land to
produce food for their communities, and the rules dictated to control these activities are
decided in places far away from these communities.

These concerns come in addition to the many sustainability concerns associated with an
expansion in the use of GMOs, including unknowns regarding human health and the
impacts on biodiversity.

In terms of alternative farming organizations, it is worth noting that organizations like

the MST have resulted in a reversal of the massive rural exodus that occurred in the
1960s to 1980s in Brazil, succeeding in legally settling 370,000 families on about 7.5
million hectares of land, despite resistance from both local and national governments.

It certainly illustrates that these governance arrangements can indeed result in

improvements to both food security and food sovereignty.

The success of La Via Campesina gatherings, and its impact on both training farmers
around the world and producing scientific research sharing knowledge about sustainable
farming techniques free of chemicals or GMOs, also illustrate the support for this
alternative model around the world.

Critiques of these efforts are not necessarily rejecting them fundamentally, arguing that
a combination of industrial production and local organization probably yields better food
security overall, explicitly rejecting the idea that agroecology alone can support
livelihoods and provide sufficient food for growing populations.

This leads to critics like those warning of the “local trap” logic underpinning many such
initiatives, where the local is prioritized over everything else because it is seen as
inherently good.

These arguments warn that local-scale food systems are just as likely to be unjust, and
that an overreliance on shortening distances between consumption and production can
lead to unsustainable practices in places that present difficult conditions for production.

No discussion of the potential effectiveness of both approaches can be complete

without pointing out perhaps the most fundamental distinction: for proponents of a
second green revolution, which mostly focus on technological innovation and
improvements in production rates, the issue is an organizational one.

In other words, we must focus on key issues with the current production system,
including inefficient use of land, making sure that unsustainable practices are
discouraged, decreasing food waste (which represent around two thirds of food
production), and carefully balancing diets around the world so that meat production
does not put an unsustainable pressure on agriculture.

On the contrary, organizations within La Via Campesina are strongly opposed to many
such measures, which they see as modest modifications to the current agricultural
system to increase its sustainability, in effect treating the problem in essentially technical
terms. In this view, we must put forward those considerations of the social and political
dimensions of food systems are essential to the required transformations.

6.4: Case Study: Climate Refugees

The term “environmental refugee” describes “people who have been forced to leave
their traditional habitat, temporarily or permanently, because of a marked
environmental disruption (natural and/or triggered by people) that jeopardizes their
existence and/or seriously affects the quality of their life.”

It is often used interchangeably with the term “climate refugee”, which are in essence a
sub-category of environmental refugees, focusing more specifically on refugees existing
because of climate change induced environmental stresses.

Introduction:
Despite a burgeoning literature and governance agenda on the phenomenon at the
international and local level, the concept does not have yet legal recognition.

The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), notably,
points out that there is some confusion over the definition of the concept, exacerbated
by the fact that is does not exist in international law.

Primarily, this is because the term refugee is defined as a person who has crossed an
international border “owing to well-founded fear of being prosecuted for reasons of
race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion”,
as stated in the 1951 Convention relating to the Status of Refugees, and the definition
was later extended to persons fleeing “events seriously disturbing public order”.

So there are at least two issues with the term climate refugees: the first is that climate
change typically creates internal displacement of people within their own countries,
before displacing them across borders; the second is that situations meeting the rest of
the criteria in the definition are only a subset of climate-related displacements, for
instance is a drought-related famine is linked to armed conflict and violence.

Therefore, the UNHCR, for one, prefers the description of “persons displaced in the
context of disasters and climate change”.

Climate Refugees:
These semantics do have importance, especially in the treatment of this issue by
international governance and law.

More commonly, however, the discussion over climate refugees uses the more general
definition of people having to leave their home region due to sudden or long-term
changes to their local environment which threaten their well-being or secure livelihood.

Think for instance of increased droughts, desertification, sea level rise, and disruption of
seasonal weather patterns.
These migration movements can either occur within the borders of the country or lead
to cross-border displacements.

Climate Refugees as a Sustainability Problem

Refugees have long been treated as a major international public problem requiring
governance arrangements.

The main aspects of the problem include:

 Preventing forced displacements, either through the direct action of certain
groups or as the indirect or unintended result of the actions of such groups.
 Ensuring the security of the migrants as a vulnerable population, both during
their movement and at their point of arrival.
 Facilitating the migrants’ settlement in the region hosting them, including their
safe integration into the host society.
In that sense, and despite the absence of legal status for climate refugees, these do not
differ from other types of refugees in the challenges that they pose. Nevertheless, there
are challenges in dealing with the case of climate refugees both today and for the
foreseeable future.

Solutions Discussed:
So, what solutions are advocated by the different actors pressing for action on the issue
of climate refugees?

Current discussions on the topic highlight three avenues for improvements through
governance.

1. Preventing movement whenever possible and desirable, in other words, reduce the
number of climate refugees.

Beyond the obvious but necessary action on climate change to limit or reduce its
impacts, such as acting to reduce worldwide emissions, it is worth noting that most
climate refugees move because of their inability to adapt to a temporarily harsh
environmental stress.

Insurance and techniques to reduce the impact of crop destruction by droughts, and
proper and resilient infrastructure to deal with floods, for instance, can go a long way
in helping vulnerable populations be more resilient in the face of climate change-
induced stresses.

This requires the embedding of climate mitigation in development planning, giving

special attention to reducing climate migration by development agencies, programs
to trans and equip farmers for drought tolerance, raising homes out of flood plains,
and more generally increasing financing by development agencies for climate
adaptation programs.
Lesson 7: Synthesis and Conclusion

7.1: Review and Key Themes

Introduction:
We have covered many topics in this course, all related to the challenges associated with
ensuring the sustainability of human activities.

We did this through the frame of discussion of governance, in other words the various efforts by
private and public actors to organize social interactions and human activity in a way that is both
conductive to reducing human pressure on sustainability and successful at orienting this activity
naturally toward a more harmonious relationship between meeting human needs and
environment quality.

In this section, we go back to these topics, and put them under a different lens, which comes
from asking the question, what are the main themes that come out of the many discussions
over sustainability issues overviewed in the course?

We identify three main themes to guide our discussion:

1. The effectiveness of governance arrangements intended to foster sustainable practices
and/or to avoid or eliminate unsustainable ones.
At one point or another, some form of effectiveness discussion and criteria intervenes in
debates about how to solve sustainability challenges, whatever the scale of the problem
identified.
On the face of it, assessing effectiveness is very straightforward, as it implies contrasting
the objectives of a given action with results over time: the difficulties thus seem only
related to technical issues, like how to operationalize the objectives, which indicators, or
evidence to choose to make that very assessment, and how to get the data necessary to
complete the assessment.
 Overview: governance arrangements are not set in stone, thus effectiveness at
the very least is something that must be re-assessed over time, and
arrangements’ adjustments are normal and should be expected.
Actually planning for these adjustments ahead of the implementation of the
initial arrangement is certainly helpful for resilience (and, ultimately,
sustainability).
Sure enough, this assessment is essential to any serious evaluation of perhaps
the most fundamental question about governance arrangements designed to
address a problem, which is, does it work? And if we can determine that as well:
does it work well?
 Which criteria to use: but this last question of whether it works, and whether it
works well, depends on a host of factors that may be politically charged and
contested.
- should we focus on determining whether it works at least cost?
 - in a timely manner?
- with as little unintended consequences as possible?
The list of potential considerations is long, and not all criteria are compatible,
which means that whatever dominant criteria ends up being used is the result of
a political struggle with winners and losers.
As we saw in the course, objectives are often flexible, not clearly defined, or at
least represent a political exercise that may target a specific version of the
problem at hand, and evaluating effectiveness often leads to a neglect or an
omission of crucial social and political impacts of certain arrangements.
 Obtaining services: most sustainability problems surrounding resources relate to
choices made over how to obtain services.
The management of any resource presents similar sustainability concerns, that
can be understood both globally and in a holistic manner: from what we saw in
lesson 1, for instance, key concepts in political discussions of sustainability, like
fixing negative externalities and market failures, or fixing social justice issues, are
present in many debates.
The politics of sustainability thus involve a recognition that whatever the
specificities of sustainability challenges, most present similar underlying political
tensions.
 Impact of arrangements vs. effectiveness: in top-down efforts led by state
governments, the challenge of ensuring both participation and compliance to an
effective agreement is partially difficult.
As we saw in the discussion over international governance efforts, the very
existence of such cooperation, however insufficient and ineffective it may be,
may participate in shifting cultural attitudes toward these problems.
This may not make a treaty or international organization more effective, but it
does point to the need to recognize other, longer-term changes partly brought by
this cooperation in how people approach sustainability.
 Changing norms and culture: a narrow focus on effectiveness sometimes
overlooks deeper cultural shifts caused (at least partly) by the existence of the
cooperation: even largely unsuccessful or insufficient public arrangements still
help in creating the cultural shift and the norms (as the case of climate change
negotiations over time demonstrates).
But these are much more difficult to assess in any precise manner.
 Mixing evaluation criteria: perhaps a mix of the several approaches to assessing
effectiveness is inevitable. Managing resources sustainably, for instance, should
at least make it possible to have a relatively narrow evaluation of effectiveness as
part of the bigger picture: is the replenishment rate rapid enough for current
extraction levels?
Are environmental harms associated with this extraction and consumption
sustainable in the long term?
Regardless of the evolution of norms, sustainability governance arrangements
necessitate an assessment of (hopefully) objective dates on the issue, so efforts
 should be made to at least collect and share this data as part of the arrangement
put in place.
2. The mixing of private and public action in these efforts.
A second theme identified throughout the course is the mixing of private and public
action in improving sustainability through governance arrangements.
Public action is largely seen as necessary to orient human activities in a way that runs
counter to some of the traditional norms of economic activities: as we have seen, the
structural characteristics of this economic growth model of development led to a poor
management of environmental externalities, and result in most of the sustainability
issues we know of today.
As we have seen, in trying to improve or solve sustainability challenges, private and
public efforts to cooperate coexist, and this is true both locally and globally.
Private action often sees the light of day because of many hesitations and insufficiencies,
perceived or real, of governmental efforts.
Perhaps especially at the global level, attempts to coordinate sustainability governance
efforts add a level of complexity to the design and implementation of effective
arrangements.
The international system is still a state-based system, where territorial sovereignty is the
overarching principle, which results in difficulties in ensuring participation, compliance,
and stringency in the changes required by the arrangement.
As a result, private and public actors often coordinate action with international reach to
deal with sustainability problems with broad scope.
What’s important to note is that this distinction between private initiatives and public
policies and governmental agreements does not change the fact that all arrangements
are created in a specific social and political context: they are shaped by this context and
the compromises necessary for obtaining political support.
The distinction between private and public arrangements does help us expect some
dynamics, however:
The politics of problem definition may be different within a private arrangement than a
governmental one.
Governments, at least democratic ones, must balance sustainability objectives with
many other pressures from their population, and this is reflected in ow the problem
ends up being defined, and which policy instruments are chosen to solve it, as the
Ontario Green Energy Act case showed.
By contrast, private arrangements will likely reflect actors’ consensus, whether it is
within a large multinational corporation, or a network of NGOs, with more freedom
toward neglecting concerns from other parts of the population.
This is both an advantage and a drawback of private action: it often enables more rapid
implementation of solutions and in some cases at least, more effective ones given the
narrowly defined objectives; but it also leads to a lack of coordination with other
initiatives or other sustainability issues affected by the arrangement. For instance,
certification arrangements like Fair Trade and the like may be developed independently
by two groups of actors, which may result in confusing consumers over what the
certification means.
 Additionally, public actors have shown to be hesitant on action to transform social
organization away from the traditional economic growth model, given the many benefits
of economic growth on social issues like poverty, raising standards of living, etc.
Private actors’ pressures on governments to transform this model have helped in
developing new norms including corporate sustainability strategies and alternative
development models, notably the idea of the circular economy.
These efforts are rapidly expanding in policy circles today but remain insufficient now in
terms of truly transforming the organization of economic activity and its impacts on the
planet.
Circular economy principles seem to help transform thinking at this point, but we remain
far from full implementation, and this does not answer all social justice issues.
3. The issues pertaining to social justice and inequality.
At its very core, sustainability governance and its human-centric vision of sustainability
have to do with social justice concerns, both intergenerational and across societies and
social groups.
Social justice is indissociable from sustainability challenges, for at least two reasons:
 The current and potential future impacts of sustainability problems
disproportionally affect marginalized or poorer populations.
 Any efforts to coordinate action to transform human activities to resolve these
issues lead to questioning about what will happen if this inequality is not
factored into these efforts, in other words, who will benefit and who will lose in a
sustainability transition where these same marginalized populations are not
being heard.
As we saw in the course, environmental justice concerns are present both at the local or
national level, as well as globally.
In many ways, the underlying tensions between economic development and
sustainability, overviewed in a different lesson, both result from and are amplified by
these social inequalities in exposure to environmental harm.
Therefore, efforts to better manage these tensions through alternative organization
models must consider the political, economic, and social aspects to sustainability issues.
The impact of climate change can also be seen as an added complication which
continues to increase stress mainly on vulnerable populations.
For many actors intervening in efforts to transform human activities, environmental
justice concerns help understand the necessity for governance arrangements that
improve equity in managing sustainability issues.
The clash between approaches in issues like food security and sovereignty provides a
good illustration of how various actors disagree about the importance to give to social
and political aspects to sustainability issues.

Conclusion:
What is essentially a survival question (how to meet human needs over the long term with an
essentially fixed set of resources) turns out to be quite complex.
This is both for technical reasons, i.e.., the interactions between certain actions and other limits,
or the fact that we have options on how to extract services from the earth in more sustainable
ways, which implies that the choices made depend on arrangements and shared rules, as
nothing in this is ‘natural’.
Also, for social reasons, as choosing these rules (or choosing not to have any) has importance
social justice repercussions.

7.2: Additional Perspectives: Consumption and Governance

The sustainability transition and the role of governance:

One overarching theme for everything discussed in the course is perhaps the fact that
sustainability has significantly grown in importance in global and local politics around the world,
despite the challenges that we face today and the limited progress in solving or managing them
so far.

To many, this limited progress should not hide the fact that we are in the early stages of a
sustainability transition, that is, a very large-scale process where all human activity is rethought
and slowly but surely transformed into more sustainable activities.

In this frame of discussion, two broad sets of actions are discussed for their potential role in
supporting, and ideally accelerating this transition: modifying consumption habits, and
sophisticating governance arrangements.

1. The potential role of sustainable consumption.

Before the Rio Earth Summit in 1992, which represented a milestone for international
cooperation on tackling sustainability issues, the discussion about environmental
protection was mostly focused on production.
Environmental policies around the world were attempts at regulating certain practices,
for instance industrial activity, to ensure that their impact on the environment was
controlled and kept to reasonable levels both for sustainability concerns and public
health. This began to change surrounding the 1992 Earth Summit, as one of the
questions put forward was, how much of a role can sustainable consumption have in
transitioning to a more sustainable global economy?
A dominant assumption underpinning efforts on sustainable consumption in the
international community is the idea that individuals can and will make more sustainable
choices if they are better informed.
Certainly, this is reflected in efforts to promote eco-labelling and other information-
sharing tools that help fic the market failure discussed earlier in the course, which is that
consumers may find it difficult to gather the information necessary to make
environmentally aware choices.
By having corporations and public actors fill this information gap, for instance by telling
customers what the life cycle environmental footprint of various products is they are
considering buying, then these consumers will necessarily factor this into their decisions,
and in turn producers will have a strong incentive to truly reduce the environmental
footprint of the products they sell to remain competitive given changing customer
preferences.
Private non-for-profit initiatives have also proliferated in recent years to help people
assess the environmental impacts of choices they make.
Environmental footprint calculators, for instance, allow individuals to see an instant
calculation of their behaviour and consumption on ecosystems and world resources, in
turn enabling a comparison between what they do today and what impact it would have
if they made different choices.
There is also a broader and more fundamental appeal to this idea of individualizing
responsibility, which related to individuals’ understanding of the impact of their actions
on society.
By providing all with information on these impacts, it not only makes responsible choices
possible, it also results in greater awareness of the very importance of these choices for
the rest of society.
Finally, other related and growingly popular initiatives in recent years are offsetting
options, mostly related to carbon emissions. For instance, different organizations around
the world allow people to purchase carbon offsets, which are used to finance
greenhouse gas reducing projects, to compensate for people’s footprint, notably
because of their use of planes.
This approach of increasing the amount of information available to ensure more
sustainable consumption also has detractors, however.
Consumer sovereignty, for instance, is more limited than what is implied by this
information-sharing approach: individuals are far from completely autonomous and
independent, as their shopping is also shaped by structural forces largely beyond their
control, like marketing and other producers’ strategies and decisions.
The range of products available is far from solely determined by customer preferences,
notably, which make the argument that consumer interest in green products forces
producers to come up with such products less convincing.
This is compounded by the fact that considering the sustainability issues associated with
the production and consumption of certain products implies an understanding of the
complexities of many processes, from agriculture to manufacturing, to recycling.
Another critique of individual-focused sustainable consumption approaches challenges
the idea that most people value the environmental footprint as much as they claim.
In other words, many consumers still end up buying cheaper products matching certain
style or usefulness preferences over environmental criteria, even in a situation where
environmental footprint information is available and clearly understood.
Of course, a final challenge to this thinking also highlights that focusing on individual
choices may produce beneficial corrections to behaviour (by having people stop using
plastic bags or straws, for instance), but that these corrections are ultimately minor and
do not represent anything close to the fundamental changes required to make human
activity more sustainable.
This is especially important when the focus on these individual decisions diverts
attention away from the problems of over-consumption and over-production, which
cannot be resolved by the strategies mentioned above.
There is a more optimistic counter-critique to these arguments.
 Contrary to what is implied in this fear that limited consumption changes may divert
attention away from real political action, others point out that it actually facilitates and
even encourages other forms of political action: when people talk and act on plastic
bags, straws, for instance, the complexity of sustainability becomes a more common
topic of discussion, in turn making it more likely that people will participate politically in
improving a large variety of sustainability issues.
In other words, attention to making individual consumption more sustainable may
“crowd in” other forms of political action.
2. The evolution of governance practices.
By focusing too much on recent governance attempts to manage sustainability
problems, we may lose sight of the evolution in governance practices.
This evolution has comprised very rapid changes in the strategies and tools used by
various actors to approach the issues overviewed in this course.
 1st key change: one such change has been a shift in environmental policy
instruments from the traditional public policy approach of command-and-control
instruments like regulations and laws constraining pollution to other types of
instruments like market-based incentives, voluntary agreements, or more
sophisticated arrangements like cap-and-trade carbon markets.
These approaches, often labelled New Environmental Policy Instruments, involve
a governance approach that is much less opposing public and private actors, and
involves private actors like corporations and consumers in the government-led
arrangement.
This evolution is sometimes seen with a wary eye, as these arrangements use
financial penalties or norm-based pressure to encourage actors to decrease their
negative impact on sustainability, all the while protecting the freedom of these
actors to continue this behaviour if they choose to accept the penalty. As a result,
there are worries about the effectiveness and the pace at which such
instruments can produce the changes required.
Nevertheless, these instruments have proliferated over the past 20 years and
have the benefit of directly involving a much broader range of actors.
 2nd key change: another change in governance practices is the blurring of the line
between global and local environmental problems: the discussion frame of
sustainability helps underscore that even local environmental problems may have
global implications for sustainability, multiplying and amplifying pressure to
collaborate in finding common solutions.
There is growing recognition that global environmental problems increasingly
manifest as local environmental problems, with immediate and short-term
impacts.
 3rd key change: a third change is that in relation to the earlier point about
transforming consumption into a sustainable activity, it should be noted that
changing individual lifestyles has not historically been the purview of
international institutions.
So, it is not surprising that voluntary initiatives have proliferated, which illustrates
the growing importance of sustainability in societies: even when governments
 are not acting, private arrangements have proliferated to try to address some
specific challenges.
These challenges tell us a few things, notably all types of actors now participate
in the governance of sustainability issues, and that change in these practices and
the norms that underpin them can indeed occur rapidly.
Whether this pace can keep up with the worsening of key sustainability questions
is, of course, the real questions.

Conclusion:
In assessing the potential benefits associated with sustainable consumption and the evolution
of governance practices linked to sustainability, we should remember two things:
Any transition to sustainability on a global level necessitates taking into consideration
demographic expectations, especially the fact that not only is the world population rapidly
growing, but the share of this population living in urban centers as opposed to rural regions will
reach 66% in 2050, compared with under 50% just a decade ago.

The limits of sustainable consumption or of past and present governance efforts largely relate to
a misunderstanding of the importance of environmental justice for various actors and
populations.

For instance, surely food consumption choices are shaped by structural forces beyond the
control of individuals: many dire problems linked to food systems, for instance, affect
disproportionately families and communities living in poverty and without access to retail points
offering the options required for them to exercise any influence on producers, let alone exercise
sustainability preferences in the choice of products they buy.

Similarly, the negative impacts of environmental stresses or of the overexploitation of mining

resources without proper attention to environmental impacts, in turn fostering conditions in
which conflict thrives, impact disproportionately some regions where populations are in short
supply of material necessities to ensure adaptation, in addition to lacking the political
representation and weight to have a say in what goes on.

Therefore, the environmental justice theme is unavoidable in any serious discussion of resolving
the key sustainability problems that face humanity now.

Governance at a broader scale is an essential part of any prospects for resolving sustainability
issues, if the societal and economic forces creating this inequality associated with sustainability
problems are to be reshaped adequately.

7.3: Concluding Thoughts

The many topics covered in this class underscore the need for a transition of human societies
toward sustainability, as well as the many challenges in doing so.
Given the significance of these challenges and the forces that underpin them, be they social,
political, economic, cultural, or natural, encouraging a transition to sustainability and
accelerating it, in addition to addressing the social justice challenges inherent in most If not all
of its dimensions, indicated that governance will continue to play a central role

As we learned in lesson 2 and 3, this role of governance and the shapes that it takes are
contested for a variety of reasons: concerns and disagreements about effectiveness, the role
that governments should play and the level of constraints they should be able to impose on
private actors and citizens, the prospects for winners and losers to arrangements and resulting
inequities, and the list goes on.

These issues are already complex on a local bases, but given the scope in the implications
among them, we must keep in mind this added layer of complexity that is brought by the global
reach of sustainability when we try to better understand, diagnose, and improve efforts to
resolve the many challenges lying ahead.