Bradley C. Parks

A mid-term analysis of progress toward international biodiversity targets

In 2010, the international community, under the auspices of the Convention on Biological Diversity, agreed on 20 biodiversity-related “Aichi Targets” to be achieved within a decade. We provide a comprehensive mid-term assessment of progress toward these global targets using 55 indicator data sets. We projected indicator trends to 2020 using an adaptive statistical framework that incorporated the specific properties of individual time series. On current trajectories, results suggest that despite accelerating policy and management responses to the biodiversity crisis, the impacts of these efforts are unlikely to be reflected in improved trends in the state of biodiversity by 2020. We highlight areas of societal endeavor requiring additional efforts to achieve the Aichi Targets, and provide a baseline against which to assess future progress. Although conservation efforts are accelerating, their impact is unlikely to improve the global state of biodiversity by 2020. Indicators of progress and decline The targets set by the Convention on Biological Diversity in 2010 focused international efforts to alleviate global biodiversity decline. However, many of the consequences of these efforts will not be evident by the 2020 deadline agreed to by governments of 150 countries. Tittensor et al. analyzed data on 55 different biodiversity indicators to predict progress toward the 2020 targets—indicators such as protected area coverage, land-use trends, and endangered species status. The analysis pinpoints the problems and areas that will need the most attention in the next few years. Science, this issue p. 241

Who Ratifies Environmental Treaties and Why? Institutionalism, Structuralism and Participation by 192 Nations in 22 Treaties

International environmental accords have become important mechanisms by which nations make promises to administer natural resources and manage the global environment. Previous studies, relying mainly on single cases or small-n data sets, have shed light on the proximate political causes of participation in these agreements. However, no study has yet systematically explained the deeper social determinants of why nations sign, ignore or resist environmental treaties. We offer a theoretically-sequenced model that exploits complementarities between rational choice institutionalism and world-systems theory. Key variables posited by realists and constructivists are also examined, using a new environmental treaty participation index based on ratifications of 22 major environmental agreements by 192 nations. Cross-sectional OLS regression and path analysis strongly supports the institutionalist claim that credibilitythe willingness and ability to honor ones international environmental commit-mentsmatters. But these measures also lend considerable support to the world-systems hypothesis that state credibility is strongly influenced by a legacy of colonial incorporation into the world economy. Narrow export baseour proxy for disadvantaged position in the world-economydirectly and indirectly (through institutions and civil society strength) explains nearly six-tenths of national propensity to sign environmental treaties. A nations natural capital, its ecological vulnerability, and international environmental NGO memberships had no explanatory power in the path analysis. Our results indicate that new theoretical, methodological and policy approaches are needed to address structural barriers to international cooperation.

Climate Change, Social Theory and Justice

This article seeks to answer why North—South climate negotiations have gone on for decades without producing any substantial results. To address this question, we revisit and seek to integrate insights from several disparate theories, including structuralism (new and old), world systems theory, rational choice institutionalism, and social constructivism. We argue that the lack of convergence on climate grew almost inevitably from our starkly unequal world, which has created and perpetuated highly divergent ways of thinking (worldviews and causal beliefs) and promoted particularistic notions of fairness (principled beliefs). We attempt to integrate structural insights about global inequality with the micro-motives of rational choice institutionalism. The structuralist insight that ‘unchecked inequality undermines cooperation’ suggests climate negotiations must be broadened to include a range of seemingly unrelated development issues such as trade, investment, debt, and intellectual property rights agreements. We conclude by reviewing the work of some ‘norm entrepreneurs’ bringing justice issues into climate negotiations and explore how these insights might influence ‘burden sharing’ discussions in the post-Kyoto world, where development is constrained by climate change.

Globalization, Vulnerability to Climate Change, and Perceived Injustice

ABSTRACT As the earths climate begins to shift into a hotter and less predictable period, there is a basic injustice in who will suffer worst and first. Nations facing rising oceans and drought are those least responsible for the problem, and they have the least resources to cope with them. To evaluate claims of environmental injustice, we examine three cases where the first signs of climate change are being felt worst and first: murderous flooding from Hurricane Mitch in Honduras, rising sea levels swamping entire Pacific Island atoll nations, and devastation from flooding among squatter settlements in Mozambique. In each case these nations are suffering not only because of bad geography or management. Rather, because of their colonial past and current positions in the world economy, they are brutally vulnerable to forces outside their control. We conclude by offering an explanation for generalized mistrust among Southern nations vis-à-vis Northern nations and the Kyoto treaty.

Inequality and the global climate regime: breaking the north-south impasse

This article explores the hypothesis that global inequality may be a central impediment to interstate cooperation on climate change policy. Conventional wisdom suggests that outcomes in international environmental politics are primarily attributable to material self-interest, bargaining power, coercion, domestic environmental values, exogenous shocks and crises, the existence of salient policy solutions, the strength of political leadership and the influence of nonstate actors. Yet none of these approaches offers a completely satisfactory explanation for the long-standing north-south divide on climate change. Drawing on social inequality literature and international relations theory, we argue that inequality dampens cooperative efforts by reinforcing ‘structuralist’ world-views and causal beliefs, polarizing policy preferences, promoting particularistic notions of fairness, generating divergent and unstable expectations about future behaviour, eroding conditions of mutual trust and creating incentives for zero-sum and negative-sum behaviour. In effect, inequality undermines the establishment of mutually acceptable ‘rules of the game’ which could mitigate these obstacles.

Environmental and Ecological Justice

It has become painfully clear over the last three decades that the causes and consequences of global environmental degradation cannot be addressed without tackling inequality and injustice. The ‘pollution of the rich and poor’ was a charged sub-theme of the 1972 United Nations Stockholm Conference (raised first by Indira Gandhi) and has steadily gained force at subsequent gatherings: Rio in 1992 and Johannesburg in 2002. With economic globalization and the increasing awareness of global warming’s devastating potential have come new discourses to address inequality on these vaster scales. Environmental issues such as climate change are being ‘reframed’ as issues of global justice, and as this happens, new potential alliances between poor nations and environmental social movements are emerging.

When Do Environmentally Focused Assistance Projects Achieve their Objectives?: Evidence from World Bank Post-Project Evaluations

Scholars and practitioners have paid considerable attention to the factors that promote successful outcomes in environmentally focused assistance projects. Previous studies have identified various potential predictors of successful outcomes, including the political commitment, institutional capacity, and governance quality of the recipient country; the severity of environmental pressures in the recipient country; donor-recipient contracting dynamics; project characteristics; and civic participation in the recipient country environment sector. We test the influence of these variables on project success using a dataset of outcome ratings for all environmentally focused World Bank projects approved since 1994. We find that strong public sector institutions in the recipient country and proactive staff supervision foster project success and that projects seeking to achieve global environmental objectives are less likely to succeed. Future research will be most fruitful if it focuses on how operational and management characteristics of individual projects lead to successful outcomes.

.Ground-truthing. Chinese development finance in Africa: Field evidence from South Africa and Uganda

ABSTRACT A new methodology, Tracking Underreported Financial Flows (TUFF), leverages open-source information on development finance by non-transparent, non-Western donors. If such open-source methods prove to be valid and reliable, they can enhance our understanding of the causes and consequences of development finance from non-transparent donors including, but not limited to, China. But open-source methods face charges of inaccuracy. In this study we create and field-test a replicable ‘ground-truthing’ methodology to verify, update, and improve open-source data with in-person interviews and site visits in Uganda and South Africa. Ground-truthing generally reveals close agreement between open-source data and answers to protocol questions from informants with official roles in the Chinese-funded projects. Our findings suggest that open-source data collection, while limited in knowable ways, can provide a stronger empirical foundation for research on development finance.

Aid, China, and Growth: Evidence from a New Global Development Finance Dataset

This paper introduces a new dataset of official financing — including foreign aid and other forms of concessional and non-concessional state financing — from China to 138 countries between 2000 and 2014. We use these data to investigate whether and to what extent Chinese aid affects economic growth in recipient countries. To account for the endogeneity of aid, we employ an instrumental-variables strategy that relies on exogenous variation in the supply of Chinese aid over time resulting from changes in Chinese steel production. Variation across recipient countries results from a country’s probability of receiving aid. Controlling for year- and recipient-fixed effects that capture the levels of these variables, their interaction provides a powerful and excludable instrument. Our results show that Chinese official development assistance (ODA) boosts economic growth in recipient countries. For the average recipient country, we estimate that one additional Chinese ODA project produces a 0.7 percentage point increase in economic growth two years after the project is committed. We also benchmark the effectiveness of Chinese aid vis-a-vis the World Bank, the United States, and all members of the OECD’s Development Assistance Committee (DAC). Our results indicate that Chinese, U.S., and OECD-DAC ODA have positive effects on economic growth, but we find no robust evidence that World Bank aid promotes growth. We also find that, irrespective of the funding source, less concessional and more commercially-oriented types of official finance do not boost economic growth. Finally, we test the popular claim that significant financial support from China impairs the effectiveness of grants and loans from Western donors and lenders. Our results do not support this claim.

Climate Change, Ethics and Human Security: A “shared vision”? Why inequality should worry us

Introduction: a “shared vision”? In late 2007, the world sighed in relief after two grueling weeks of international climate negotiations that resulted in an upbeat-sounding ‘Bali Roadmap.’ The Roadmap identified a series of steps that might be taken to break the North–South impasse and solve the global climate crisis. In particular, a process under an Ad Hoc Working Group for Long-Term Cooperative Action under the Convention (AWG-LCA) was tasked with breaking the deadlock over who should act in cleaning up the atmosphere, and how. The answer, according to the Roadmap, was that developed and developing countries would move forward with “a shared vision for long-term cooperative action, including a long-term global goal for emissions reductions, to achieve the ultimate objective of the Convention [avoiding dangerous climate change].” However, as negotiations moved on to Bonn, Accra, and Poznan in 2008, nearly every word of the Bali Action Plan was contested. In the run-up to the 14th Conference of the Parties of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP14) in Poznan, Poland, in December, 2008, 76 Parties submitted “Ideas and Proposals” to the Working Group. China asserted that developed countries would need to “tak[e] the lead in reducing their emissions of greenhouse gases, while ensuring development rights and spaces for developing countries.” Only with such a mid-term target being clearly determined, they argued, is it meaningful to talk about any long-term goals for emission reductions (UNFCCC, 2008b).