Obtaining International Environmental Protection through Epistemic Consensus

It is widely accepted that transboundary pollution problems require international co-operation for their solution, because many countries suffer the effects of such degradation and no country is unilaterally capable of managing the issue. While most environmental issues share these characteristics, which inhibit their resolution internationally, these issues are really little different from other global issues involving ‘common property resources’ — for example, trade and security. In all of these matters, national leaders are usually averse to serious co-operative efforts because of their doubts about reciprocity and verification, as well as common political antipathies among states.1 While these problems appear to reflect some mutual interests — all countries are affected by environmental degradation and a unified response is universally preferable to a patchwork of disjointed efforts — enduring and profound differences of interest impede co-operation. Differences about who pays, states’ unwillingness to forego short-term economic welfare and other distributional disagreements typically inhibit the formation of strong collective arrangements. Environmental issues are little different from the type of zero-sum bargaining efforts with which students of international relations are so familiar. Further, many less developed countries (LDCs) view efforts by the developed world to promote environmental protection as duplicitous efforts to retard economic growth in the Third World.2 In short, mutual interests are actually quite weak, and countries are often reluctant to co-operate unless they are certain that the protection costs will be equally distributed.