Circulations of Norms and Actor Networks in Global Environmental Governance

Informations

Funding country

France

Acronym

CIRCULEX

URL

-

Start date

1/1/2013

End date

1/1/2016

Budget

236,721 EUR

Fundings

Abstract

Tools and institutions of international cooperation built up after the 2nd World War seemed to be underperforming when facing global threats on the environment, the importance of which is underlined by many recent scientific reports. International Law must go beyond its traditional purpose of supporting inter-state cooperation since it must now define rules and standards likely to be incorporated into the national legislation to help coordinate, if not harmonise, national environmental legal and policy frameworks. Beyond this remarkable expansion of international Law (some say treaty congestion) these institutions and instruments have been significantly transformed to cope with the above-mentioned threats with some new kinds of expert advice, the development of multilateral treaty making, some new types of norms, the growing role of private actors, and the development of new forms of international control --both public and private. However the global environmental governance remains fragmented. Without a world executive and legislative power, there is a proliferation on the international scene of norm producers and disseminators. The creation of a World Environmental Organisation is still in limbo and it is also disputable whether such an organisation would suffice to integrate the “multiple sites of governance” [Snyder, 2010]. The latter are loosely articulated, among themselves and with the other regulation mechanisms in domains such as trade, investment or human rights and so on, although some research points at the burgeoning architecture mixing or alternating synergy, cooperation and conflict relations between different regimes [Biermann, 2009]. The international governance of the environment was first understood through international regime analysis, where regimes are defined as sets of principles, norms, rules, and procedures, which shape the behaviour of actors in a specific area. In practice this corresponds to international conventions and subordinate treaties. More recently though, it was suggested that these regimes are embedded in some more elaborated settings labelled “regime complexes”. These are made of three or more international regimes addressing some different issues within a common domain, which not only co-exist by also interact on substance or at operational level, without being formally coordinated, and by working alongside with other governance mechanisms involving private corporations and NGOs. On the basis of this conceptualisation that saddles International Law, International Relations, Political Science, Political Economy and Sociology, this research project aims to analyse the enabling conditions, the forms and the impacts of norm circulation within actor networks by focusing on two important regime complexes, biodiversity and climate change. The fragmentation diagnosis being well established, it seems important to analyse these process through actor network analysis and focus on circulation of norms and actors. The core concept here is the “permeability” of the various elements of the regime complex, how circulation takes place and what are the impacts on the complex itself, and beyond on international governance as a whole.