Lorraine Elliott

ASEAN and environmental cooperation: norms, interests and identity

Environmental degradation in Southeast Asia has been implicated in what some describe as a failure of regional cooperation and a crisis of regional identity and credibility within ASEAN. This article examines environmental decline in Southeast Asia as a consequence of the region’s changing political economy and modes of production and suggests that regional cooperation on environmental challenges is more likely to be successful if it reflects some form of bounded cosmopolitanism embedded in a regional community of rights and duties. Drawing on identity-based accounts of regional cooperation to explore the relationship between ideas, interests and policy in the region, it identifies three phases of environmental cooperation since 1977. It argues that, despite apparent ideational and institutional advances over this period, ASEAN has been unable to respond effectively to regional environmental challenges for normative as well as material reasons. Yet while environmental cooperation has been constrained by the ASEAN way, the imperatives for such cooperation have challenged the ASEAN’s political norms and confirmed the ambiguities of regional identity within Southeast Asia.

Transnational environmental crime in the Asia Pacific: an 'un(der)securitized' security problem?

Abstract While other forms of transnational crime in the Asia Pacific have been securitized – that is, represented by policy elites and security actors as crucial or existential threats to national and regional security – transnational environmental crime has been un(der)securitized. It warrants little mention in regional security statements or the security concerns of individual countries. Yet the consequences of activities such as illegal logging and timber smuggling, wildlife smuggling, the black market in ozone-depleting substances and dumping of other forms of hazardous wastes and chemical fit the (in)security profile applied to other forms of transnational crime. This article surveys the main forms of transnational environmental crime in the Asia Pacific and assesses the ‘fit’ with a ‘crime as security’ framework. It shows that transnational environmental crime generates the kinds of ‘pernicious effects … on regional stability and development, the maintenance of the rule of law and the welfare of the regions people’ that the ASEAN Declaration on Transnational Crime identified as matters of serious concern. The analysis draws on securitization theory to understand the lack of a ‘securitizing move’ and to explain why security elites do not believe the problem warrants serious attention. The possibilities explored here include intellectual inertia, confusion about referent objects, institutional incapacity, mixed policy signals and the exclusion of environmental expertise from a closed community of security elites.

ASEAN and environmental governance: Strategies of regionalism in Southeast Asia

Most studies of regionalism in Southeast Asia pay little attention to environmental concerns as part of the regions empirical dynamic. In contrast, this article examines the ways in which governments have come to “govern” environmental issues at a regional scale under the auspices of ASEAN, against the backdrop of debates about the political topography of Southeast Asian regionalism. The framework adopted here brings together analyses of the public space of formal regional governance arrangements, the inter-subjective space of regional identity building, and the private space of regional social practices. Underpinning this is the question of whether moves to supposedly “flatter” forms of regional governance have been accompanied by for more democratic or participatory forms of regionalism. I conclude that regional environmental structures under ASEAN are more akin to “invited spaces” and have generally failed to offer effective channels of communication for, or democratic representation of, a wider range of stakeholders, including civil society groups and local communities.

Shades of green in East Asia: the impact of financial crises on the environment

In his 2009 report on the world financial and economic crisis and its impact on development, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon expressed concerns about a range of direct and indirect impacts on the environment. Those concerns included the impact of a slow-down in investment in environmentally sustainable technologies, as well as the impact of stimulus packages that relied on poorly planned infrastructure and resource development. They included worries about whether higher levels of unemployment would result in greater and unsustainable use of subsistence resources. Against the backdrop of these concerns, this article examines the impact of both the 1997 Asian financial crisis and the current global financial crisis on environmental sustainability in East Asia. It shows that both crises generated similar patterns of environmental impact, but that those impacts were at times counter-intuitive and ambiguous. Positive impacts were short-lived and negative impacts were little affected in the longer term.

Cosmopolitan environmental harm conventions

The global politics of the environment is increasingly a politics of transnational harm that raises important questions about injustice and global ethics. One response to the injustices of environmental harm is found in the demands for cosmopolitan harm conventions—social practices that define what is permissible in relations between human beings in a way that does not privilege the interests of insiders over outsiders. This article explores the theory and practice of cosmopolitan environmental harm conventions with particular attention to the issues of rights, obligations and a politics of consent. It concludes that while many existing environmental harm conventions are often only marginally cosmopolitan, despite appearances to the contrary, cosmopolitan ideas are sufficiently robust to provide a theoretical and ethical road map for dealing with global environmental injustice.

Imaginative Adaptations: A Possible Environmental Role for the UN Security Council

While statements by the United Nations Security Council and the Secretary-General demonstrate that environmental degradation is accepted as a possible non-military threat to international peace and security, none of the relevant documentation proceeds to consider how the Security Council might respond to such new threats and sources of instability and conflict. This article examines and evaluates a number of options available to the Security Council should its members choose to address this agenda in more detail. It argues that the UN Charter, international humanitarian law and operational precedent provide an environmental mandate for the Security Council. Any authorization of force, however, is most likely to be confined to environmental war crimes. A more important environmental role for the Security Council lies in preventive diplomacy, conflict resolution and postconflict reconstruction.

Improving the Global Environment: Policies, Principles and Institutions

Recent surveys in Australia show that improving the global environment rates high as a public policy concern. Responding to these challenges at a global level requires more than finding the best or most appropriate scientific, economic and technical approaches. It also requires that global environmental governance be based on sound normative principles. Two of the most important principles respond to the challenge that, while humanity is outstripping its ecological footprint, contributions to global environmental change are uneven and the experience of environmental harm is being displaced across time and space. Improving the global environment should therefore take into account the precautionary principle and the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities. Improving the global environment also requires a more robust institutional framework. The model favoured here is to build on UNEP to establish a more coherent, more authoritative and more independent environmental organization.

Environmental regionalism: moving in from the policy margins

ABSTRACT In the last 30 years, environmental challenges in the Asia-Pacific have gone from sitting at the margins of political discourse to featuring prominently in academic and policy debates about institutional capacity, economic sustainability and regional futures. Those challenges are extensive: they include loss of biodiversity and species, land degradation and deforestation, water pollution and scarcity, drought, wildlife smuggling, ozone depletion, other forms of atmospheric pollution, and climate change. This article explores regional responses to environmental challenges through a global governance lens. It examines the ways in which vertical and intergovernmental arrangements have been supplemented by institutions and networks that reflect horizontal and transnational approaches. It reveals that this has been an uneven process, with coherence and fragmentation equally represented. In its focus on the two key subregions of Southeast Asia and Northeast Asia, it shows how environmental cooperation has been implicated in a crisis of regionalism and caught up in states’ efforts to demonstrate that governance can still be effective in the absence of binding multilateral agreements.

Transnational environmental crime: excavating the complexities – an introduction

The term ‘transnational environmental crime’ (TEC) seems to have entered the academic lexicon in different contexts in Michalowski and Bitten (2005) and Elliott (2007a). It has since gained currency as a specific ‘term of art’ within criminology (White 2011), governance and regulation (Bisschop 2015), international political economy (Elliott 2014), international law, and even in security studies (Elliott 2007b). The phrase has also come to be used in the sphere of global public policy, often as a development of earlier and more limited concepts such as international environmental crime (see, for example, Gosling 2014; Stoett 2015). As many of the chapters in this volume indicate, there is no universally accepted definition of transnational environmental crime in international law as there is, for example, of transnational organized crime. The United Nations Convention against Transnational Organized Crime has a rather tortuous definition of what makes criminal activity transnational. A crime is transnational if it is committed in more than one state; is committed in one state but a substantial part of its preparation, planning, direction or control takes place in another state; or is committed in one state but has substantial effects in another state (Article 3). André Bossard, former Secretary General of the International Criminal Police Organization (INTERPOL), has a much simpler definition: the activity must be recognized as a criminal offence in at least two countries as a result of international or national law and a border must be crossed (cited in Friman and Andreas 1999, p. 5). In the case of transnational environmental crime, this bordercrossing can involve the perpetrators, the products and/or the illegal profits. For our purposes, transnational environmental crime involves, and is defined as, crossborder trading of species, resources, waste or pollutants in violation of prohibitions or regulatory regimes established by multilateral environmental agreements (MEAs), or in contravention of national laws. It includes the trafficking of illegally logged timber (sometimes called ‘stolen’ timber); the illegal trade in endangered, threatened and protected species; the transboundary dumping of toxic and hazardous

Smuggling Networks and the Black Market in Ozone Depleting Substances

The black market in ozone-depleting substances (ODS) is a direct consequence of international agreement on targets to reduce and phase-out the production and consumption of such chemicals. Yet the Montreal Protocol says nothing about illegal trade (as opposed to unauthorised trade) and it is widely accepted that the Parties had not anticipated such an outcome and were slow to respond. In effect, then, the Protocol itself created the opportunity structure for illegal activity in situations where perverse incentives generate high profits and low entry costs. This chapter draws on criminology, economic sociology and public policy to examine the logistic trails and smuggling networks that sustain the ODS black market. It examines how ODS smuggling has gone global, how that black market blurs the boundaries between legitimate industry and white collar crime, and how those involved have been able to adjust their strategies for illegal transboundary activity in response to changing structures of demand and supply.