Kate O'Neill

Out of the Backyard: The Problems of Hazardous Waste Management at a Global Level:

This article explores recent developments in the regulation of the international hazardous waste trade. It begins with the move in recent years toward banning the North-South waste trade and shows how this ban reflects a particular specification of the waste trade, as a transboundary environmental issue whereby domestic waste management problems are seen as issues of sovereign national responsibility. It examines another way of formulating the waste trade: as a symptom of more fundamental problems afflicting waste management sectors in most industrialized countries. Without taking this perspective into account, the ban on the waste trade is likely to fail. The final section is more optimistic, examining how certain countries—Britain, France, Germany, and Australia—are formulating policy change in ways likely to have an impact on the waste trade, drawing conclusions about how the role of international authorities might be revised in the light of these developments.

The Changing Nature of Global Waste Management for the 21st Century: A Mixed Blessing?

This article examines the impact of global and economic pressures on hazardous waste management practices during the 1980s and 1990s and into the twenty-first century. It charts out four sets of recent changes in these practices. These are: first, a shift in the basic regulatory problem, from one of a more local nature to the internationalization of waste management issues; second, changes in the structure of the waste disposal industry worldwide; third, changes in policies regarding hazardous waste in EU member states; and fourth, changes in waste management policies in emerging economies. The article analyzes these changes in the light of the growing involvement of the private sector in international environmental regulation, and of the complex and sometimes contradictory impacts of international regulations on domestic politics. It argues that neither a race to the bottom nor a race to the top hypothesis fully holds, but that changing public/private and domestic/international balances are a mixed blessing.

Radioactive "Trade": Globalizing the Nuclear Fuel Cycle

I late 2000, Russia presented a plan that alarmed many environmentalists and security analysts at home and abroad: it offered to take in civilian nuclear wastes from around the world and store or possibly reprocess them over the long term, at a price. Russia’s nuclear safety record is poor, to say the least, and the Speaker of the Upper House of the Duma, Yegor Stroyev, has called the scheme “a gift to madmen and the Mafia.”1 The fact that this scheme is being welcomed and given serious consideration by several possible exporters highlights the desperation felt by many nuclear power-generating countries in the absence of any long-term scheme for dealing with their wastes. The Russian proposal also highlights how the civilian nuclear fuel cycle has become more global in its scope, and more commercialized, as a result of private sector and multilateral efforts to address problems of nuclear waste management. Nuclear power has experienced a revival in recent years. Touted by its supporters as a solution to climate change, countries which hitherto were scaling back their dependence on nuclear power are reviving plans to expand their nuclear energy programs. Nuclear power was highlighted in President Bush’s 2001 National Energy Plan, Britain is going ahead with plans to build a new reprocessing plant, and even Australia is planning a new reactor. But nuclear waste management has always posed severe problems for any nuclear power-generating nation because of the physical risks associated with waste disposal and transportation. The main physical risks lie in the danger of leaked radioactive materials and possible diversion of waste shipments into weapons manufacture. The

The Environment and International Relations: International environmental problems

As with many other issues – managing the global economy, human rights, combating diseases such as HIV/AIDS, and controlling terrorism and the proliferation and global spread of weapons of mass destruction – the global environment represents a series of problems that are so complex and widespread that unilateral measures – measures undertaken by countries acting on their own initiative – are not enough to forestall them. This is an interdependent world: even if a country the size of the USA or Brazil managed to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by a significant amount, without other countries doing likewise, we cannot prevent the total impacts of climate change. Global problems are not new. But, over recent decades, they have increased in scale, scope, visibility, and complexity. The international community itself has changed too. Membership of the United Nations has grown by 370 percent since 1945; NGOs, corporations, and expert groups are seeking a voice in international affairs; economic globalization has increased the complexity of global management; and new technology – notably the internet – has vastly increased the speed and quantity of information traveling the globe (Simmons and Oudraat 2001). This chapter does not set out to provide an assessment of the state of the global environment in the early years of the twenty-first century and the directions in which it is headed.