Human institutions—ways of organizing activities—affect the resilience of the environment. Locally evolved institutional arrangements governed by stable communities and buffered from outside forces have sustained resources successfully for centuries, although they often fail when rapid change occurs. Ideal conditions for governance are increasingly rare. Critical problems, such as transboundary pollution, tropical deforestation, and climate change, are at larger scales and involve nonlocal influences. Promising strategies for addressing these problems include dialogue among interested parties, officials, and scientists; complex, redundant, and layered institutions; a mix of institutional types; and designs that facilitate experimentation, learning, and change.

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The Struggle to Govern the Commons

This paper analyses the development of carbon markets: markets in permits to emit greenhouse gases or in credits earned by not emitting them. It describes briefly how such markets have come into being, and discusses in more detail two aspects of the efforts to ‘make things the same’ in carbon markets: how different gases are made commensurable, and how accountants have struggled to find a standard treatment of ‘emission rights’. The paper concludes by discussing the attitude that should be taken to carbon markets (for example by environmentalists) and the possibility of developing a ‘politics of market design’ oriented to making such markets more effective tools of abatement.

Making things the same: Gases, Emission Rights and the Politics of Carbon Markets

The past decade has witnessed a growing interest among scholars of international relations, and global environmental governance in particular, in the role of transnational networks within the international arena. While the existence and potential significance of such networks has been documented, many questions concerning the nature of governance conducted by such networks and their impact remain. We contribute to these debates by examining how such networks are created and maintained and the extent to which they can foster policy learning and change. We focus on the Cities for Climate Protection (CCP) program, a network of some 550 local governments concerned with promoting local initiatives for the mitigation of climate change. It is frequently asserted that the importance of such networks lies in their ability to exchange knowledge and information, and to forge norms about the nature and terms of particular issues. However, we find that those local governments most effectively engaged with the network are mobilized more by the financial and political resources it offers, and the legitimacy conferred to particular norms about climate protection, than by access to information. Moreover, processes of policy learning within the CCP program take place in discursive struggles as different actors seek legitimacy for their interpretations of what local climate protection policies should mean. In conclusion, we reflect upon the implications of these findings for understanding the role of transnational networks in global environmental governance.

Transnational Networks and Global Environmental Governance: The Cities for Climate Protection Program

Eited by A ild A nelsen Moving Ahead with REDD Issues, Options and Implications Mving Aead ith REDD Isues, O pions nd Im plitions REDD (reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation) is based on a simple idea: pay developing countries to reduce CO2 emissions from the forest sector. Nevertheless, design and implementation of a REDD system raise many hard questions: How are emissions reductions monitored, reported and veri ed? How should REDD be nanced? Should payments be directed to countries, projects, or both? How should reference levels be set? How are non-permanence and leakage accounted? How to achieve REDD co-bene ts and avoid doing harm?

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Moving ahead with REDD: issues, options and implications

The European Union's Emissions Trading Scheme (EU ETS) is the world's largest market for carbon and the most significant multinational initiative ever taken to mobilize markets to protect the environment. It will be an important influence on the development and implementation of trading schemes in the US, Japan, and elsewhere. However, as is true of any pioneering public policy experiment, this scheme has generated much controversy. Pricing Carbon provides the first detailed description and analysis of the EU ETS, focusing on the first 'trial' period of the scheme (2005–7). Written by an international team of experts, it allows readers to get behind the headlines and come to a better understanding of what was done and what happened based on a dispassionate, empirically based review of the evidence. This book should be read by anyone who wants to know what happens when emissions are capped, traded, and priced.

Pricing Carbon: The European Union Emissions Trading Scheme

This book examines why some international environmental regimes succeed while others fail. Confronting theory with evidence, and combining qualitative and quantitative analysis, it compares fourteen case studies of international regimes. It considers what effectiveness in a regime would look like, what factors might contribute to effectiveness, and how to measure the variables. It determines that environmental regimes actually do better than the collective model of the book predicts. The effective regimes examined involve the End of Dumping in the North Sea, Sea Dumping of Low-Level Radioactive Waste, Management of Tuna Fisheries in the Pacific, and the Vienna Convention and Montreal Protocol on Ozone Layer Depletion. Mixed-performance regimes include Land-Based Pollution Control in the North Sea, the Convention on Long-Range Transboundary Air Pollution, Satellite Telecommunication, and Management of High Seas Salmon in the North Pacific. Ineffective regimes are the Mediterranean Action Plan, Oil Pollution from Ships at Sea, International Trade in Endangered Species, the International Whaling Commission, and the Convention for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources.

Environmental Regime Effectiveness: Confronting Theory with Evidence

Contents: Preface Introduction Analytical framework Development of EU ETS Initiating EU emissions trading Deciding on EU emissions trading Implementing EU emissions trading Conclusions References Annex Index.

EU Emissions Trading: Initiation, Decision-making and Implementation

The EU as a frontrunner on greenhouse gas emissions trading: how did it happen and will the EU succeed?

The EU emissions trading scheme has been characterized as one of the most farreaching and radical environmental policies for many years, and “the new grand policy experiment.” Given the EU's earlier resistance to this market-based instrument with no international track record and with US origins, the EU decision-making process, which took less than two years, can be characterized as a puzzlingly ultra-quick political “pregnancy.” In order to understand this, it is necessary to take three explanatory perspectives—and the interaction between them—into account. First, the emissions trading issue was more mature within the EU system than immediately apparent, given that emissions projections were worrying and no effective common climate policies had been adopted. Second, the Commission acted as a strong and clever policy entrepreneur, dealing with other basically positive EU bodies. Third, when the US pulled out of the Kyoto process in March 2001, it provided a window of opportunity for the EU to take the rei...

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The Making of the 2003 EU Emissions Trading Directive: An Ultra-Quick Process due to Entrepreneurial Proficiency?

The article compares the interplay between soft law institutions and those based on hard law in international efforts to protect the North Sea, reduce transboundary air pollution, and discipline fisheries subsidies. Our cases confirm that ambitious norms are more easily achieved in soft law institutions than in legally binding ones, but not primarily because they bypass domestic ratification or fail to raise concerns for compliance costs. More important is the greater flexibility offered by soft law instruments with respect to participation and sectoral emphasis. Second, ambitious soft law regimes put political pressure on laggards in negotiations over binding rules, but this effect is contingent on factors such as political saliency and reasonably consensual risk and option assessment. Third, hard-law instruments are subject to more thorough negotiation and preparation which, unless substantive targets have been watered down, makes behavioral change and problem solving more likely. Finally, although most...

Jørgen Wettestad

Papers

Environmental Regime Effectiveness: Confronting Theory with Evidence

EU Emissions Trading: Initiation, Decision-making and Implementation

The EU as a frontrunner on greenhouse gas emissions trading: how did it happen and will the EU succeed?

The Making of the 2003 EU Emissions Trading Directive: An Ultra-Quick Process due to Entrepreneurial Proficiency?

Soft Law, Hard Law, and Effective Implementation of International Environmental Norms