Geoffrey Wandesforde-Smith

Biodiversity Conservation and Protected Areas in China: Science, Law and the Obdurate Party-State

The recent increase in scholarly and other professional interest in environmental policy in China is quite remarkable. It is almost as remarkable as the persistent inability of that literature, despite the generally high quality, impressive disciplinary range, and diverse national origins of the contributions, to settle on any clear or widely shared understanding of how environmental policy in China works, or why it works the way it does. The essay reviews recent important contributions to the literature.

Wildlife Conservation and Protected Areas: Politics, Procedure and the Performance of Failure Under the EU Birds and Habitats Directive

Attentive students of international wildlife law and policy will have noted that the Birds and Habitats Directives of the European Union (EU) have lost a great deal of their former luster. Not too very long ago, when Simon Lyster was compiling the first compendium of international wildlife law, the Birds Directive was the poster child of potentially effective international wildlife law and policy. Both it and the Habitats Directive, which came later but with which it is now usually bracketed, appeared to be toughly worded, mandatory rather than hortatory in the obligations they imposed on EU Member States, and equipped with explicit reporting and deadline requirements – the very models, in key respects, of effective international wildlife law.What happened? This paper reviews the argument that the Directives have fallen prey to the performance of failure. It then asks what might explain the reluctance of the British courts to quash major development projects on the basis of non-compliance with the Directives. It concludes that domestic courts, at least in Britain, are sometimes willing to give the law a sympathetic reading, but not at the expense of appearing to decide political questions or raising constitutional issues about the separation of powers. The watchword is deference. And the result is a climate in which settled expectations about development, both for implementing agencies and business, remain largely undisturbed.

The Law and Policy of Biodiversity Conservation in the Caribbean: Cutting a Gordian Knot

Once upon a time, not very long ago, the Caribbean seemed like an ideal region in which to demonstrate the power and efficacy of international environmental law for solving many if not most of the problems of biodiversity conservation. This part of the world, which can be formally defined as the Wider Caribbean Region (WCR) but is simply referred to, here, as the Caribbean, was a natural proving ground for the regional seas programs developed and advocated through the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) in the early 1970s and subsequently supported by much of the rest of the UN system, as well as by a diversity of international environmental and development non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and aid agencies.

WILDLIFE, MARKETS, STATES, AND COMMUNITIES IN AFRICA: LOOKING BEYOND THE INVISIBLE HAND

The idea that if wildlife is to have a sustainable, long-term future in Africa then it needs to pay its own way has become a central tenet of communal approaches to natural resource management. Often called community-based conservation (CBC), community based natural resource management (CBNRM), or some other acronymic variation on this theme, these approaches have emerged as a new orthodoxy of African conservation. Their ascent to this status can be marked by the appearance in 2001 of a widely cited book firmly linking the future of African wildlife to the future of African livelihoods. Subjecting the management of wildlife to the discipline of the market is, however, an audacious and controversial proposition, whether in Africa or elsewhere. This has not stopped the majority of community-based techniques of conservation in Africa from using this mechanism as the primary means

Looking for Law in All the Wrong Places? Dying Elephants, Evolving Treaties, and Empty Threats

JOURNAL OF INTERNATIONAL WILDLIFE LAW & POLICY 2016, VOL. 19, No. 4, XXX-XXX PERSPECTIVE Looking for Law in All the Wrong Places? Dying Elephants, Evolving Treaties, and Empty Threats Geoffrey Wandesforde-Smith 1. Introduction: Understanding CITES as Law with Limitations In the scholarship of international law there are a number of memorable defenses, made over the last several decades, of the value and importance of the 1973 Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) 1 for helping to prevent wildlife extinctions. 2 Most memorable, perhaps, are the classic case for the ultimate perfectibility of CITES as an instrument of international law made in the context of elephant conservation by Michael Glennon in 1990; 3 the frequently cited brief for the possibly endless adaptability and evolutionary ingenuity of the Convention made by Peter Sand in 1997; 4 and the vigorous, full- throated assertion of both the desirability and inevitability of continuance of the treaty pretty much in its present form made by John Scanlon, the Secretary-General of CITES, in a special journal issue devoted to an appraisal and assessment of the evolving treaty 5 that appeared not long after the 16 th Conference of the Parties (CoP) to CITES, held in Bangkok in March of Scanlon argued in 2013 that CITES CoP 16 manifested an unusually high degree of both comity among the parties and determination to stay the course in implementing the convention, CONTACT Geoffrey Wandesforde-Smith gawsmith@ucdavis.edu Emeritus Professor of Political Science, University of California, Davis, CA 95616, USA. 1 Its full name is the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (emphasis added). It was initially agreed and signed on 3 March 1973 and entered into force on 1 July 1975, after ratification by just ten countries. There are now more than 180 states parties. Up to date information about the content of the treaty and the list of participating states is maintained at https//www.cites.org (accessed 1 August 2016). 2 Whether and how CITES prevents or helps to prevent the extinction of wild species is perennially controversial. The treaty regulates trade in species and parts of species on the assumption that in some cases trade can be a principal cause of species endangerment and possible extinction. This begs the question of whether trade is a more powerful cause of possible extinction than, say, habitat loss, which is conventionally identified as the chief cause of endangerment and extinction, or climate change, or some other driving variable. 3 Michael Glennon, Has International Law Failed the Elephant ? 84 A M . J. I NT ’ L L. 1-43 (1990). 4 Peter Sand, The Evolution of a Treaty Regime in the Borderland of Trade and Environment , 8 E UR . J. I NT ’ L L. 29-58 5 John Scanlon, CITES at Its Best: CoP 16 as a ‘Watershed Moment’ for the World’s Wildlife , 22 R EV . E UR . C OMM . & I NT ’ L E NVTL . L. (hereinafter RECIEL) 222-227 (2013). See also John Scanlon, In a World of 7 Billion People How Can We Protect Wildlife? T HE G UARDIAN , Aug. 30, 2016 (online at https://www.theguardian.com/environment/ 2016/aug/30/7-billion-people-how-protect-wildlife-endangered-species? accessed 3 Sept. 2016). 6 The International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD) routinely tracks the deliberations associated with all the major environmental treaties. For a summary of the CITES CoP 16 discussions in Bangkok in 2013, see http://www.iisd.ca/vol21/enb2183e.html (accessed 1 August 2016).

Selling Zoning: Do Density Bonus Incentives for Moderate-Cost Housing Work?

Abstract Many cities in the United States have adopted inclusionary housing programs, which require developers to provide some units at below-market rents or prices. The supporters1 and critics2 of these housing programs agree that, to pass legal muster, inclusionary programs must not reduce project profits below normal levels.3 Local governments, then, must decide whether to offer financial incentives that would compensate developers for the reduced value of controlled projects.

Wildlife Conservation and Protected Areas: Darwin, Marx, and Modern Science in the Search for Patterns That Connect

The recent appearance in print of the first and so far only comprehensive and critical assessment of the global proliferation of protected areas and, more importantly and more usefully, of their meaning and significance in the modern world, is a publishing event this journal cannot possibly fail to notice. Even though this contribution to the literature on wildlife and protected areas sidesteps marine protected areas, and focuses instead, as do so many other analyses of protected areas, on the national parks and game reserves and other sorts of terrestrially demarcated units the world has long depended upon for wildlife and habitat conservation, the appearance of this work, it seems to us, is a landmark event. Context is always critical in our view, and in this case the context is one of substantial intellectual ferment. The publication of this first broad global overview of the origins, purposes, and limitations of protected areas, a work that overall is admirably ambitious and audacious, occurs in an environment in which two other important new titles have also recently made an appearance,

Bursting the Biofuel Bubble: Comparative Dynamics of Transitions to Freedom from Oil

The remarkable recent surge of interest in biofuels, we argue, can be traced to the publication of a World Bank report in 2005, highlighting the contribution biofuels might make to meeting needs for transportation fuels, as well as to development in countries growing feedstocks. But the resulting bubble of enthusiasm, at least with respect to agricultural biofuels, seems to have burst at the beginning of 2008. Among alternative explanations of why this happened, we favor the view that international organizations, particularly environmental and developmental NGOs, forced a fundamental reappraisal of biofuels policy, certainly in Europe. We then ask whether enthusiasm for various magic bullet or technological breakthrough solutions is a basic dynamic of energy system transformation. We are more impressed with the argument that radical transitions of the kind needed to secure freedom from oil are much longer-term processes of cumulative causation. It is an open question whether such processes can be treated as endogenous to the economic system and be left to work largely through markets or whether they should be managed and guided through more interventionist policies.

Bracketing Braverman: Thinking and Acting for Wildlife Conservation after Nature

Journal of International Wildlife Law & Policy ISSN: 1388-0292 (Print) 1548-1476 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/uwlp20 Bracketing Braverman: Thinking and Acting for Wildlife Conservation after Nature Geoffrey Wandesforde-Smith To cite this article: Geoffrey Wandesforde-Smith (2016) Bracketing Braverman: Thinking and Acting for Wildlife Conservation after Nature, Journal of International Wildlife Law & Policy, 19:2, 176-187, DOI: 10.1080/13880292.2016.1167476 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13880292.2016.1167476 Published online: 11 May 2016. Submit your article to this journal View related articles View Crossmark data Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=uwlp20 Download by: [50.173.132.85] Date: 11 May 2016, At: 12:45

Exploring the Borderlands between Wild and Non-Wild Animals: Wildlife Law and Policy in Transition

This is the editorial introduction to an international collection of papers exploring the borderlands between wild and non-wild animals, and their implications for the future of wildlife law and policy.