Peter M. Haas

Introduction: epistemic communities and international policy coordination

How decision makers define state interests and formulate policies to deal with complex and technical issues can be a function of the manner in which the issues are represented by specialists to whom they turn for advice in the face of uncertainty. The contributors to this issue examine the role that networks of knowledge-based experts—epistemic communities—play in articulating the cause-and-effect relationships of complex problems, helping states identify their interests, framing the issues for collective debate, proposing specific policies, and identifying salient points for negotiation. Their analyses demonstrate that control over knowledge and information is an important dimension of power and that the diffusion of new ideas and data can lead to new patterns of behavior and prove to be an important determinant of international policy coordination.

Do regimes matter? Epistemic communities and Mediterranean pollution control

International regimes have received increasing attention in the literature on international relations. However, little attention has been systematically paid to how compliance with them has been achieved. An analysis of the Mediterranean Action Plan, a coordinated effort to protect the Mediterranean Sea from pollution, shows that this regime actually served to empower a group of experts (members of an epistemic community), who were then able to redirect their governments toward the pursuit of new objectives. Acting in an effective transnational coalition, these new actors contributed to the development of convergent state policies in compliance with the regime and were also effective in promoting stronger and broader rules for pollution control. This suggests that in addition to providing a form of order in an anarchic international political system, regimes may also contribute to governmental learning and influence patterns of behavior by empowering new groups who are able to direct their governments toward new ends.

Conclusion: epistemic communities, world order, and the creation of a reflective research program

Studies in this issue show that the epistemic communities approach amounts to a progressive research program with which students of world politics can empirically study the role of reason and ideas in international relations. By focusing on epistemic communities, analysts may better understand how states come to recognize interests under conditions of uncertainty. According to this research program, international relations can be seen as an evolutionary process in which epistemic communities play meaningful roles as sources of policy innovation, channels by which these innovations diffuse internationally, and catalysts in the political and institutional processes leading to the selection of their shared goals. The influence of epistemic communities persists mainly through the institutions that they help create and inform with their preferred world vision. By elucidating the cause-and-effect understandings in the particular issue-area and familiarizing policymakers with the reasoning processes by which decisions are made elsewhere, epistemic communities contribute to the transparency of action and the development of common inferences and expectations and thereby contribute to policy coordination. International cooperation and, indeed, the development of new world orders based on common meanings and understandings may thus depend on the extent to which nation-states apply their power on behalf of practices that epistemic communities may have helped create, diffuse, and perpetuate.

Banning chlorofluorocarbons: epistemic community efforts to protect stratospheric ozone

The emergence of scientific evidence that emissions of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) were depleting the stratospheric ozone layer prompted an epistemic community of atmospheric scientists and concerned policymakers to push for regulations regarding CFC use. Members of the transnational epistemic community played a primary role in gathering information, disseminating it to governments and CFC manufacturers, and helping them formulate international, domestic, and industry policies regarding CFC consumption and production. Community members contributed to the timing and stringency of CFC regulations through a combination of strategies ranging from the persuasion of individuals to the capture of various decision-making channels. Most important, by influencing the actions of the United States and DuPont, the largest producer of CFCs, the epistemic community changed the external environment in which policy decisions were made by other governments and firms.

Knowledge, power, and international policy coordination

The increasing complexity of the worlds problems has escalated both the need for international policy co-ordination and the difficulty of achieving it. With that in mind, the contributors to this volume assess what happens to the distribution of power when policymakers rely on the counsel of technical experts to make decisions of international importance. Because the way states identify and respond to problems depends not only on how policymakers understand the issues but also on how the issues are represented by their advisers, the contributors examine the growing role that epistemic communities play in several areas: facilitating governmental learning; articulating the cause-and-effect relationships of global problems; helping to discern state interests; framing the issues for collective debate; proposing specific policies; and identifying salient points for international negotiation.

Navigating the Anthropocene: Improving Earth System Governance

The United Nations conference in Rio de Janeiro in June is an important opportunity to improve the institutional framework for sustainable development. Science assessments indicate that human activities are moving several of Earths sub-systems outside the range of natural variability typical for the previous 500,000 years (1, 2). Human societies must now change course and steer away from critical tipping points in the Earth system that might lead to rapid and irreversible change (3). This requires fundamental reorientation and restructuring of national and international institutions toward more effective Earth system governance and planetary stewardship.

Addressing the Global Governance Deficit

There is mounting concern about a global governance deficit for managing international environmental problems and sustainable development. This article reviews the proposals and justifications for reform, and suggests an alternative model of global governance based on diffuse networks of diverse actors performing multiple and overlapping functions. Some reform proposals are offered to improve the prospects of network-based global governance.

Obtaining International Environmental Protection through Epistemic Consensus

It is widely accepted that transboundary pollution problems require international co-operation for their solution, because many countries suffer the effects of such degradation and no country is unilaterally capable of managing the issue. While most environmental issues share these characteristics, which inhibit their resolution internationally, these issues are really little different from other global issues involving ‘common property resources’ — for example, trade and security. In all of these matters, national leaders are usually averse to serious co-operative efforts because of their doubts about reciprocity and verification, as well as common political antipathies among states.1 While these problems appear to reflect some mutual interests — all countries are affected by environmental degradation and a unified response is universally preferable to a patchwork of disjointed efforts — enduring and profound differences of interest impede co-operation. Differences about who pays, states’ unwillingness to forego short-term economic welfare and other distributional disagreements typically inhibit the formation of strong collective arrangements. Environmental issues are little different from the type of zero-sum bargaining efforts with which students of international relations are so familiar. Further, many less developed countries (LDCs) view efforts by the developed world to promote environmental protection as duplicitous efforts to retard economic growth in the Third World.2 In short, mutual interests are actually quite weak, and countries are often reluctant to co-operate unless they are certain that the protection costs will be equally distributed.

Pragmatic Constructivism and the Study of International Institutions

This article provides a pragmatic constructivist approach for progressing study in International Relations (IR) that sidesteps the ontological differences between major IR approaches, and that is capable of influencing practices in international relations. In particular, it looks at how international institutions can be studied and the possible consequences of how they are studied. While institutions are at times, as realists and neoliberal institutionalists contend, merely the artifacts of strategically and rationally motivated state actors, they are viewed differently by pragmatic constructivists. Institutions may, at times, be wilful actors on their own, but are also the venue in which reflexive new practices and policies develop. Pragmatic constructivism provides the explanatory lens through which this may be understood, as well as the methodological guidelines by which such a process may be pursued.

Climate Change Governance after Bali

It is a long and winding road from Bali to a meaningful climate change regime. The “Bali Roadmap” is singularly indistinct in its details. Because the stakes are extremely high, we are unlikely to see any diplomatic breakthroughs in the negotiations until the very last minute. Consequently, I argue in this piece that the next year or so can be fruitfully used to help build the political support for achieving a genuine breakthrough at that fateful point. Relying on multilateral diplomacy, based on the general model which has been successfully pursued to create international regimes in other substantive domains of global environmental politics, is not likely to be effective for climate change in the short to medium term. I offer some suggestions to improve the prospects for multilateralism through an effort to fortify the foundations for meaningful multilateral diplomacy while we still have time. The issue of climate change now seems armly planted on the international agenda. Yet the political will for meaningful action is not yet apparent. The facts of the matter are now fairly clear. Scientiac consensus is expressed in the most recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Working Group (WG) I report, which calls anthropogenic climate change “unequivocal.”1 Between the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report, the Stern Review, and now the recent award of the Nobel Peace Prize to Al Gore and the IPCC, it is widely agreed that severe consequences will occur if global concentrations of carbon are allowed to exceed 450–550 ppm by 2050. Keeping emissions below this level will entail 50–85 percent reductions in carbon dioxide emissions by 2050 from current levels.2 A standard list of policy responses was also endorsed by the IPCC WG III, many of which hearken back to 1970s efaciency framing of the energy policy