Addressing Global Environmental Issues

For the past few decades, national governments, public and private research institutions, and corporations have worked in one capacity or the other, towards environmental protection and to fashion human behaviour in tune with environmental needs. More recently, a number of environmental activist groups have become transnational. This is the primary subject of the book under review.

Appreciating the fundamental role of nation-states in addressing global environmental issues, transnational environmental activists lobby with government officials to pursue the cause of environmental protection and influence decision making at both national and international levels.

This sort of lobbying by transnational activists has been crucial to the advancement of international environmental law and practice. And the achievements of such efforts have been formidable. Cases in point include the strengthening of the London Dumping Convention, the establishment of an international ban on elephant ivory trading, and enforcing the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES).

In addition to lobbying with governments, the activists in this area strive to bring about changes in the social dimension to make it more responsive to the current and emerging global environmental crisis. They also attempt to influence the established institutional machinery to bring about changes in corporate practices and shift standards of environmentally good conduct. Working through socio-cultural networks and educating a large number of people, they intend to induce environmentally sound practices. The author of this book, Paul Wapner, writes that organised outside the formal perimeters of interstate politics, transnational environmental activists seek to transmute the extended fabric of civil societies by practising `Global Civic Politics.

Wapner presents case studies of the manner in which organisations such as Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth (FOE), and World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) undertake the task of explicating the nature of politics practised by transnational environmental groups. He also explores the insights around which these activists organise their efforts. Some people hold that the present world of sovereign states is too fragmented and competitive to address global ecological problems successfully. So, to do the job there has to be some ancillary mechanisms to address the problem.

Wapner sees some connection between this opinion and the work of Greenpeace, which seeks to alter the minds and action of people by disseminating ecological sensibility across the globe without creating an institutional presence. For Greenpeace, consciousness itself can be a form of governance. Their activists operate through the global cultural realm to create conditions which will direct more congenial human behaviour and practices.

There have been divergent thoughts which flow from the perception that a nation-state is too large an entity to express concern over the local dynamics of environmental harm, and address the sum of environmental dangers successfully. The activities of WWF can be seen in this perspective, which aim at environmental restoration and protection through the empowerment of the local people .

In contrast to this, Wapner shows how the basic perceptions of FOE emanate from the understanding that the states are enmeshed in networks of economic, social and cultural processes that are not derivative of interstate relations. Therefore, FOEs endeavour is to alter these processes so as to reflect a concern for the global environment.

The case studies cogently delineate how the mechanisms of environmental activism outside the formal arena of nation and inter-state politics actually alter the way people around the globe live their lives and the consequent impact of these processes on the elements of governance in world affairs. By critically analysing the world civic politics practised by transnational environmental activists in the wider domain of the NGO movement this sheds new light on the role of NGOs in world affairs.

Wapner does not subscribe to the idea that transnational environmental activism presents the final comprehensive answer to the global environmental problems. However, he strongly feels that these are very much a part of the ongoing search and one can learn much from the analysis of their modus operandi.