The global economic system and access and allocation in earth system governance

Environmental justice issues have been incrementally but consistently covered within this journal in the last two decades. This article reviews theoretical and empirical approaches to justice in INEA scholarship in order to identify trends and draw lessons for the interpretation and implementation of the 2030 Agenda and for living within environmental limits. Our review traces how justice considerations were initially covered within new institutionalist scholarship on collective action and social practices, to conceptualizing justice as ‘access and allocation’, to newer notions of planetary justice. We link these trends to scholarship on diverse epistemologies and typologies of justice, including conservative, corrective, distributive and procedural justice, and examine their operationalization within the empirical domains of climate, water and sustainable development. In concluding, we draw out implications for the 2030 Sustainable Development Agenda. We argue that a just approach is essential to living within environmental limits, with greater synergies needed between collective action and social practice approaches. While justice can be unpacked for practical and political reasons into access and allocation, we find that (procedural) access considerations are more politically palatable in practice than a concern with allocation (distributive justice), which remains much more contested. As such, dominant approaches promote ‘conservative’ or thin market-based notions of justice. We conclude by noting that just allocation is a precondition to just access. A failure to prioritize and achieve more corrective and distributive forms of justice will, without doubt, contribute to exacerbating global ecological degradation.

Section: Going Beyond: Implications For the 2030 Agendamentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Going Beyond: Implications For the 2030 Agendamentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Going Beyond: Implications For the 2030 Agendamentioning

confidence: 99%

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Equity, justice and the SDGs: lessons learnt from two decades of INEA scholarship

Gupta

Vegelin

2022

“…A recently published special INEA issue on 'Access and Allocation in Earth System Governance' (Gupta & Lebel, 2020) reveals, however, just how systemic the forces behind these inequities are. Global trade and investment schemes, industry-related financial flows, and other forms of transnational and market-regulated governance prove considerably decisive in determining the access to and allocation of environmental goods and burdens (Gonenc et al, 2020;Kalfagianni, 2014). This, again, points at a need to integrate all dimensions of justice in our assessment of environmental and climate justice, and, empirically, highlights the necessity of a closer integration of the Paris Agreement on the one hand, and the 2030 Agenda's Sustainable Development Goals on the other (Ivanova et al, 2020).…”

Section: Understanding Equity Post-parismentioning

confidence: 99%

20 Years of global climate change governance research: taking stock and moving forward

Pattberg

Kaiser

Widerberg

et al. 2022

Research on global climate change governance is no longer primarily concerned with the international legal regime, state practice and its outcomes, but rather scrutinizes the intricate interactions between the public and the private in governing climate change. This broad trend has also taken center stage within the pages of INEA. Two decades after its establishment, we sketch the main theoretical debates, conceptual innovations and empirical findings on global climate change governance and survey the new generation of climate governance scholarship. In more detail, we sketch how climate governance research has developed into three innovative sub-debates, building on important conceptualizations and critical inquiries of earlier debates. Our aim is not so much to provide an all-encompassing assessment of global climate change governance scholarship in 2022, but rather to illustrate in what important ways current research is different from research in the early phase of INEA, and what we have learned in the process. First, we discuss scholarship on the bottom-up nature of climate governance, developing from earlier ideas on agency beyond the state and the transnationalization of governance arenas. Second, we review contributions that have more systematically engaged with the concept of governance architectures, resulting in a stimulating new academic debate on the characteristics of complex governance systems and the consequences of governance complexity and fragmentation. Third, we note a distinct normative turn in global environmental scholarship in general and global climate governance in particular, associated with question of access, accountability, allocation, fairness, justice and legitimacy. The assessment of each of these debates is centered around questions of effective and legitimate climate governance to counter the climate emergency. Finally, as a way of concluding, we critically reflect on our own scholarly shortcomings and suggest a modest remedy.

“…However, these transfers were discussed in the light of their (hypothesized) impact on coalition formation, and not so much in terms of empirical outcomes or impacts. Like Gonenc et al (2020) rightfully observe, although fairness and equity are emerging themes in the economic analysis of IEAs, "critical questions about [impacts on] vulnerable groups" (e.g. indigenous communities) and "potential pathways for more equitable sharing of benefits and burdens" remain to be an under-researched area in the current literature.…”

Section: Assessing Ieas: Efficiency Effectiveness and Equitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Economic analysis of international environmental agreements: lessons learnt 2000–2020

Pouw

Weikard

Howarth³

2022

On the occasion of the 20th anniversary of International Environmental Agreements: Politics, Law & Economics, we conduct an extensive review of papers published in this journal that address the economic dimensions of international environmental agreements (IEAs). We focus particularly on the lessons learnt from this body of literature and the implications for the assessment and design of IEAs in relation to goals such as efficiency, effectiveness, and equity. Our key conclusions run as follows. First, at the international level, universal coalitions are more cost-efficient and effective than fragmented regimes, but more difficult to negotiate and less stable. Second, in developing countries, there is need for substantial external funding to cover the short-run costs of environmental compliance. Third, market-based solutions have been increasingly applied in international agreements but with mixed results. For example, cap-and-trade systems have the potential to achieve greenhouse gas emissions reductions and least economic cost. But in the provisioning of water services, private sector solutions often result in outcomes that are unaffordable for low-income groups or nonviable for businesses, suggesting well-designed public–private partnerships. At the international level, Green Bond markets can attract investors for climate and environmental projects, but implementation failures tend to weaken outcomes. Finally, in practical politics, economically optimal designs are rarely achieved. Future applied economic research should therefore critically investigate institutions and the scope for their reform. Gains in knowledge are expected to come from economic analyses taking a broader perspective on “the economy”, taking institutions and social and ecological relations into account from the start.