Traditionally, the evolution of governance mechanisms has been studied at a macro level, whereas ... more Traditionally, the evolution of governance mechanisms has been studied at a macro level, whereas the impacts of institutions and regimes are investigated at a micro-level. There has been insufficient attention paid to understanding the vertical linkages of institutions from the international level down to the household level. Similarly, there has been little research on the interactions of horizontally linked institutions at multiple scales and what impacts they have on achieving policy outcomes and affecting local livelihoods. As states continue to negotiate the future of a global climate regime, it is important that better understand its potential distributional and human security implications; the current segmented research approach masks these consequences. The proposed research seeks to address this research gap with both methodological and substantive contributions through an in-depth investigation of forest carbon regimes. More specifically, the proposed research will examine...
What role does trust play in global climate governance? For decades, claims of mistrust and distr... more What role does trust play in global climate governance? For decades, claims of mistrust and distrust have dominated climate change policy arenas: doubts about climate change science and disagreements over rights and responsibilities related to mitigation, adaptation, loss, and damages undermine trust, impeding progress toward effective global climate action. And although frequently invoked in explanations of weak or failed climate action, there is limited research exploring the role of trust as a distinct concept in global climate governance. Here we seek to address this gap by developing a relational framework that focuses attention on how trust dynamics shape cooperation in four types of relationships: reliance, reciprocity, responsibility, and recognition. Applying this framework to the UNFCCC, we consider how efforts like expanded participation impact the relational landscape in global climate governance. We focus in particular on Indigenous Peoples and non‐state actors to demonstrate how the UNFCCC's efforts to address its legitimacy and credibility problems have neither adequately considered trust nor created opportunities to develop the transformative relationships needed for more effective climate governance. We suggest that greater attention to trust can help scholars and practitioners better understand how relational phenomena shape the landscape of governance possibilities.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, May 31, 2019
The development of this methods project, and the articles in the special section, started from a ... more The development of this methods project, and the articles in the special section, started from a simple shared observation: the concepts for studying global environmental agreement-making did not fit with what we—researchers in this area of study—have observed in practice. This observation raised two critical questions: first, what constitutes a site of global environmental agreement making, and second, which actors and forms of power shape the negotiation dynamics and final agreed text? Reconsidering what constitutes a negotiating site in global environmental politics emerged from research into the practices of intergovernmental assessment production and adoption within the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES). Although these assessment-making bodies are typically not considered or studied as sites of global environmental agreement-making, when you gain access and observe the production of intergovernmental text, it becomes possible to compare and connect these sites—and the knowledge they produce—with the negotiations they are designed to inform. Exploring these intergovernmental scientific processes as negotiation sites enables us to empirically investigate the processes through which actors seek to uphold or contest the knowledge and authority that underpins global environmental action. Second, which actors are identified as significant and what constitutes their power remain bounded by an accepted convention that agreement-making happens between state actors. While scholarship on NGO participation, among other work, has already challenged this convention, our conceptualizations of power continue to overlook the effects of the participation of marginalized groups, such as Indigenous Peoples, in global environmental negotiations. To adequately study the multiple sites of agreement-making and identify the influence of all actors invested in its products, we need new conceptual and methodological apparatus. The articles in this special section begin the process of designing and testing this new apparatus, with the aim of challenging who, what and how we explore the processes of negotiating the collective response to environmental degradation
Traditionally, the evolution of governance mechanisms has been studied at a macro level, whereas ... more Traditionally, the evolution of governance mechanisms has been studied at a macro level, whereas the impacts of institutions and regimes are investigated at a micro-level. There has been insufficient attention paid to understanding the vertical linkages of institutions from the international level down to the household level. Similarly, there has been little research on the interactions of horizontally linked institutions at multiple scales and what impacts they have on achieving policy outcomes and affecting local livelihoods. As states continue to negotiate the future of a global climate regime, it is important that better understand its potential distributional and human security implications; the current segmented research approach masks these consequences. The proposed research seeks to address this research gap with both methodological and substantive contributions through an in-depth investigation of forest carbon regimes. More specifically, the proposed research will examine...
The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Environmental Politics, 2021
The politics of environmental justice increasingly feature in environmental governance across mul... more The politics of environmental justice increasingly feature in environmental governance across multiple levels. Environmental defenders risk their lives to protect land, water, and forests. Non-human actors like rivers are gaining rights. Frontline environmental justice communities now include nation-states like Fiji that faces existential threats from climate change. Indigenous Peoples’ fights for self-determination illuminate how deeply connected and inseparable are the politics of sovereignty, representation, and environment. This chapter explores these developments to chart and examine how a politics of environmental justice can inform environmental and social policies by treating environmental justice as a driver, rather than unintended consequence, of policy and politics. Through this critical, comparative review, the chapter illuminates how and why environmental justice concerns matter for environmental governance and for the study of comparative environmental politics.
On October 29, 2010, following two weeks of intense negotiations, parties to the Convention on Bi... more On October 29, 2010, following two weeks of intense negotiations, parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) at the Tenth Conference of Parties (COP10) in Nagoya, Japan, adopted the Nagoya Protocol on Access to Genetic Resources and the Fair and Equitable Sharing of Beneats Arising from their Utilization. Although points of contention were few, they were substantive: beyond deaning what resources and knowledge would be covered under the regime, negotiations centered on determining how to fairly distribute beneats from the use of genetic resources and deciding with whom beneats would be shared. Discussions threatened to break down almost daily, as parties would not budge from their positions. Just after the deadline to complete the anal negotiations passed, negotiators announced that no agreement on access and beneats sharing (ABS) could be reached. Many parties and observers left the room in frustration; delegates were overheard saying “we failed,” and news of the failu...
Although Indigenous Peoples make significant contributions to global environmental governance and... more Although Indigenous Peoples make significant contributions to global environmental governance and were prominent actors at the 2015 Paris Climate Summit, COP21, they remain largely invisible in conventional, mainstream, and academic accounts of COP21. In this article, we adopt feminist collaborative event ethnography to draw attention to often marginalized and unrecognized actors and help make visible processes that are often invisible in the study of power and influence at sites of global environmental governance. Specifically, we integrate current approaches to power from international relations and political ecology scholarship to investigate how Indigenous Peoples, critical actors for solving global environmental challenges, access, navigate, and cultivate power at COP21 to shape global environmental governance. Through conceptual and methodological innovations that illuminate how Indigenous Peoples overcome structural and spatial barriers to engagement, this article demonstrate...
The collection of articles in this special section provides an important contribution to our unde... more The collection of articles in this special section provides an important contribution to our understanding of environmental justice: it speaks to existing debates on the multidimensional nature of justice while also contributing new insights into barriers to environmental justice. In particular, the articles illustrate how analyses of environmental justice cases that attend to difference – in needs, capacities, identities, worldviews, and norms – can help scholars, practitioners, and policy-makers navigate environmental justice claims. Perhaps most importantly, these cases draw our attention to the multiple avenues through which difference is displaced – relocated, shifted, or removed from the decision-making space – creating multiple pathways to environmental injustice. This collection illustrates how analyses framed through a multidimensional lens can capture such mechanisms of justice and injustice. In this forum essay, I place the collection of articles in the broader context of the expanding body of literature on environmental justice and draw specific attention to the processes that obscure opportunities for environmental justice. For more than 40 years, social scientists and activists have drawn attention to environmental injustices resulting from the rapidly changing human–environment interactions that stem from the pressures of globalization, industrialization, and population growth. Initially the term “environmental justice” emerged to characterize these injustices – the disproportionate adverse health and quality of life impacts borne by low income and primarily minority communities as a result of living in close proximity to toxic sites (Bullard 1990; Taylor 2014). Early incidents in the US, such as the Warren County, North Carolina PCB dumping case and hazardous chemical waste exposure in Love Canal galvanized the public, merging the civil rights movement and the anti-toxics movement (Walker 2012, 1). These events drew attention to how racism and socioeconomic injustices manifest in environmental governance, therewith igniting the environmental justice movement (Bullard 1993). Although scholars traditionally associate environmental justice research with the US environmental justice movement, especially the prominent cases highlighted above, environmental justice studies have been ongoing across the globe since the 1970s. Political ecologists in particular have assembled a growing body of evidence documenting how primarily poor, rural communities are systematically marginalized and adversely affected by environmental change and the policy solutions designed to tackle these changes (Cliffe and Moorsom 1979; Blaikie and Brookfield 1987; Peluso 1993; Fairhead and Leach 1995; Peet and Watts 1996; Bryant and Bailey 1997; Pritchett and Woolcock 2004). Peluso (1993), for example, documents how the Kenyan government in partnership with the World Wildlife Federation, as part of a large-scale wildlife
Traditionally, the evolution of governance mechanisms has been studied at a macro level, whereas ... more Traditionally, the evolution of governance mechanisms has been studied at a macro level, whereas the impacts of institutions and regimes are investigated at a micro-level. There has been insufficient attention paid to understanding the vertical linkages of institutions from the international level down to the household level. Similarly, there has been little research on the interactions of horizontally linked institutions at multiple scales and what impacts they have on achieving policy outcomes and affecting local livelihoods. As states continue to negotiate the future of a global climate regime, it is important that better understand its potential distributional and human security implications; the current segmented research approach masks these consequences. The proposed research seeks to address this research gap with both methodological and substantive contributions through an in-depth investigation of forest carbon regimes. More specifically, the proposed research will examine...
What role does trust play in global climate governance? For decades, claims of mistrust and distr... more What role does trust play in global climate governance? For decades, claims of mistrust and distrust have dominated climate change policy arenas: doubts about climate change science and disagreements over rights and responsibilities related to mitigation, adaptation, loss, and damages undermine trust, impeding progress toward effective global climate action. And although frequently invoked in explanations of weak or failed climate action, there is limited research exploring the role of trust as a distinct concept in global climate governance. Here we seek to address this gap by developing a relational framework that focuses attention on how trust dynamics shape cooperation in four types of relationships: reliance, reciprocity, responsibility, and recognition. Applying this framework to the UNFCCC, we consider how efforts like expanded participation impact the relational landscape in global climate governance. We focus in particular on Indigenous Peoples and non‐state actors to demonstrate how the UNFCCC's efforts to address its legitimacy and credibility problems have neither adequately considered trust nor created opportunities to develop the transformative relationships needed for more effective climate governance. We suggest that greater attention to trust can help scholars and practitioners better understand how relational phenomena shape the landscape of governance possibilities.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, May 31, 2019
The development of this methods project, and the articles in the special section, started from a ... more The development of this methods project, and the articles in the special section, started from a simple shared observation: the concepts for studying global environmental agreement-making did not fit with what we—researchers in this area of study—have observed in practice. This observation raised two critical questions: first, what constitutes a site of global environmental agreement making, and second, which actors and forms of power shape the negotiation dynamics and final agreed text? Reconsidering what constitutes a negotiating site in global environmental politics emerged from research into the practices of intergovernmental assessment production and adoption within the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES). Although these assessment-making bodies are typically not considered or studied as sites of global environmental agreement-making, when you gain access and observe the production of intergovernmental text, it becomes possible to compare and connect these sites—and the knowledge they produce—with the negotiations they are designed to inform. Exploring these intergovernmental scientific processes as negotiation sites enables us to empirically investigate the processes through which actors seek to uphold or contest the knowledge and authority that underpins global environmental action. Second, which actors are identified as significant and what constitutes their power remain bounded by an accepted convention that agreement-making happens between state actors. While scholarship on NGO participation, among other work, has already challenged this convention, our conceptualizations of power continue to overlook the effects of the participation of marginalized groups, such as Indigenous Peoples, in global environmental negotiations. To adequately study the multiple sites of agreement-making and identify the influence of all actors invested in its products, we need new conceptual and methodological apparatus. The articles in this special section begin the process of designing and testing this new apparatus, with the aim of challenging who, what and how we explore the processes of negotiating the collective response to environmental degradation
Traditionally, the evolution of governance mechanisms has been studied at a macro level, whereas ... more Traditionally, the evolution of governance mechanisms has been studied at a macro level, whereas the impacts of institutions and regimes are investigated at a micro-level. There has been insufficient attention paid to understanding the vertical linkages of institutions from the international level down to the household level. Similarly, there has been little research on the interactions of horizontally linked institutions at multiple scales and what impacts they have on achieving policy outcomes and affecting local livelihoods. As states continue to negotiate the future of a global climate regime, it is important that better understand its potential distributional and human security implications; the current segmented research approach masks these consequences. The proposed research seeks to address this research gap with both methodological and substantive contributions through an in-depth investigation of forest carbon regimes. More specifically, the proposed research will examine...
The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Environmental Politics, 2021
The politics of environmental justice increasingly feature in environmental governance across mul... more The politics of environmental justice increasingly feature in environmental governance across multiple levels. Environmental defenders risk their lives to protect land, water, and forests. Non-human actors like rivers are gaining rights. Frontline environmental justice communities now include nation-states like Fiji that faces existential threats from climate change. Indigenous Peoples’ fights for self-determination illuminate how deeply connected and inseparable are the politics of sovereignty, representation, and environment. This chapter explores these developments to chart and examine how a politics of environmental justice can inform environmental and social policies by treating environmental justice as a driver, rather than unintended consequence, of policy and politics. Through this critical, comparative review, the chapter illuminates how and why environmental justice concerns matter for environmental governance and for the study of comparative environmental politics.
On October 29, 2010, following two weeks of intense negotiations, parties to the Convention on Bi... more On October 29, 2010, following two weeks of intense negotiations, parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) at the Tenth Conference of Parties (COP10) in Nagoya, Japan, adopted the Nagoya Protocol on Access to Genetic Resources and the Fair and Equitable Sharing of Beneats Arising from their Utilization. Although points of contention were few, they were substantive: beyond deaning what resources and knowledge would be covered under the regime, negotiations centered on determining how to fairly distribute beneats from the use of genetic resources and deciding with whom beneats would be shared. Discussions threatened to break down almost daily, as parties would not budge from their positions. Just after the deadline to complete the anal negotiations passed, negotiators announced that no agreement on access and beneats sharing (ABS) could be reached. Many parties and observers left the room in frustration; delegates were overheard saying “we failed,” and news of the failu...
Although Indigenous Peoples make significant contributions to global environmental governance and... more Although Indigenous Peoples make significant contributions to global environmental governance and were prominent actors at the 2015 Paris Climate Summit, COP21, they remain largely invisible in conventional, mainstream, and academic accounts of COP21. In this article, we adopt feminist collaborative event ethnography to draw attention to often marginalized and unrecognized actors and help make visible processes that are often invisible in the study of power and influence at sites of global environmental governance. Specifically, we integrate current approaches to power from international relations and political ecology scholarship to investigate how Indigenous Peoples, critical actors for solving global environmental challenges, access, navigate, and cultivate power at COP21 to shape global environmental governance. Through conceptual and methodological innovations that illuminate how Indigenous Peoples overcome structural and spatial barriers to engagement, this article demonstrate...
The collection of articles in this special section provides an important contribution to our unde... more The collection of articles in this special section provides an important contribution to our understanding of environmental justice: it speaks to existing debates on the multidimensional nature of justice while also contributing new insights into barriers to environmental justice. In particular, the articles illustrate how analyses of environmental justice cases that attend to difference – in needs, capacities, identities, worldviews, and norms – can help scholars, practitioners, and policy-makers navigate environmental justice claims. Perhaps most importantly, these cases draw our attention to the multiple avenues through which difference is displaced – relocated, shifted, or removed from the decision-making space – creating multiple pathways to environmental injustice. This collection illustrates how analyses framed through a multidimensional lens can capture such mechanisms of justice and injustice. In this forum essay, I place the collection of articles in the broader context of the expanding body of literature on environmental justice and draw specific attention to the processes that obscure opportunities for environmental justice. For more than 40 years, social scientists and activists have drawn attention to environmental injustices resulting from the rapidly changing human–environment interactions that stem from the pressures of globalization, industrialization, and population growth. Initially the term “environmental justice” emerged to characterize these injustices – the disproportionate adverse health and quality of life impacts borne by low income and primarily minority communities as a result of living in close proximity to toxic sites (Bullard 1990; Taylor 2014). Early incidents in the US, such as the Warren County, North Carolina PCB dumping case and hazardous chemical waste exposure in Love Canal galvanized the public, merging the civil rights movement and the anti-toxics movement (Walker 2012, 1). These events drew attention to how racism and socioeconomic injustices manifest in environmental governance, therewith igniting the environmental justice movement (Bullard 1993). Although scholars traditionally associate environmental justice research with the US environmental justice movement, especially the prominent cases highlighted above, environmental justice studies have been ongoing across the globe since the 1970s. Political ecologists in particular have assembled a growing body of evidence documenting how primarily poor, rural communities are systematically marginalized and adversely affected by environmental change and the policy solutions designed to tackle these changes (Cliffe and Moorsom 1979; Blaikie and Brookfield 1987; Peluso 1993; Fairhead and Leach 1995; Peet and Watts 1996; Bryant and Bailey 1997; Pritchett and Woolcock 2004). Peluso (1993), for example, documents how the Kenyan government in partnership with the World Wildlife Federation, as part of a large-scale wildlife
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Papers by Kimberly Marion Suiseeya