Daniel Behn

Tensions between the Liberalist and Statist Approaches to Energy Trade Governance: The Case of Gas Dual Pricing

This chapter explores the seemingly divergent legal principles that influence and guide the current energy relationship between Europe and Russia. This relationship is indicative of the co-dependency that has emerged in recent decades between resource-rich and resource-dependent states. In essence, it appears that resource-dependent states tend to promote ideals of market liberalization, while resource-rich states often pursue policies involving state domination over their natural resource sector.

Trumping the Environment? An Empirical Perspective on the Legitimacy of Investment Treaty Arbitration

Disputes involving an environmental component continue to be at the forefront of ongoing legitimacy debates in investment treaty arbitration. Critics of the international investment regime contend that arbitration favors the property rights of foreign investors over the need of host states to environmentally regulate and legislate in the public interest. While there is some doctrinal and anecdotal evidence to this effect, we ask whether investment treaty arbitration as a whole is as problematic for domestic environmental protection as has been perceived. With mixed method techniques, we analyze environmental cases in the context of five specific legitimacy concerns. Overall, we find that critiques of the system require nuance and clarification of the normative benchmarks for legitimacy assessments. In a number of important areas, the critiques do have purchase but in the aggregate, the most problematic cases are often successfully defended by respondent states.

Linking Climate Change Mitigation and Poverty Reduction: Continued Reform of the Clean Development Mechanism in the Post-Kyoto Era to Promote Sustainable Energy Development on the African Continent

There is concern from a human development perspective that demands to reduce global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions will unjustly deprive developing countries of the same opportunities for industrialization already afforded to the developed world. Humanitarians argue that such a limitation could inequitably deny the developing world from achieving the economic development needed to free its populations from extreme poverty. Yet choices to eradicate extreme poverty or solve the global climate change problem need not be mutually exclusive. This chapter aims to identify the limiting factors of the current CDM and to advocate for a mechanism in the post-Kyoto era that will provide LDCs with improved opportunities for pursuing sustainable energy development strategies. Section 13.2 will outline the structures and function of the CDM as implemented during the first compliance period. Sections 13.3, 13.4, and 13.5 will identify and analyze the operational and institutional deficiencies that have emerged in the implementation of the CDM. Section 13.6 will propose a reform agenda for the CDM in the post-Kyoto era; a modified framework and set of rules better designed to facilitate sustainable energy development in African and other slow developing countries.