Ronald B. Mitchell

Knowledge systems for sustainable development

The challenge of meeting human development needs while protecting the earths life support systems confronts scientists, technologists, policy makers, and communities from local to global levels. Many believe that science and technology (S&T) must play a more central role in sustainable development, yet little systematic scholarship exists on how to create institutions that effectively harness S&T for sustainability. This study suggests that efforts to mobilize S&T for sustainability are more likely to be effective when they manage boundaries between knowledge and action in ways that simultaneously enhance the salience, credibility, and legitimacy of the information they produce. Effective systems apply a variety of institutional mechanisms that facilitate communication, translation and mediation across boundaries.

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.

Sources of Transparency: Information Systems in International Regimes

Scholars and practitioners alike have stressed the important role of transparency in promoting international regime compliance and effectiveness. Yet many regimes fail to create high levels of transparency: governments and nongovernmental actors regularly fail to monitor or report on their own behavior, the behavior of other actors, or the state of the problem these regimes seek to resolve. If more transparency often, if not always, contributes to regime effectiveness, then identifying the sources of transparency becomes an important research task. Regime transparency depends upon both the demand for information and the supply of information. Specifically, regimes can seek “effectiveness-oriented” information to assess whether regime members are collectively achieving regime goals or “compliance-oriented” information to assess whether particular actors are individually fulfilling regime commitments. The incentives and capacities that relevant actors—whether governments, nongovernmental organizations, or corporate actors—have to provide such information depend on whether the regimes information system is structured around self-reporting, other-reporting, or problem-reporting. Although many of these factors are determined by characteristics of the actors involved or the structure of the problem, regimes can increase transparency by enhancing the incentives and capacity actors have to contribute to a particular regimes transparency.

Problem Structure, Institutional Design, and the Relative Effectiveness of International Environmental Agreements

To accurately assess the relative effectiveness of international environmental agreements requires that we pay greater attention to how problem structures influence both institutional design and the outcomes we use to evaluate institutional effects. Analyzing multiple agreements allows us to move beyond claims that an agreement was influential to claims regarding which variables explain that influence, to examine how institutional influence depends on other factors and to evaluate an agreements effectiveness relative to other agreements and non-institutional influences. Accounting for problem structure is crucial to such endeavors because problem structure variables may be alternatives to or interact with institutional variables and because institutional design is endogenous to the problem structure-outcome relationship. The shortcomings related to incorporating problem structure in extant effectiveness research can be overcome through four strategies: carefully describing analytically useful variation in problem structure, selecting cases to limit variation in problem structure, evaluating problem structure variables and their influence on design and behavior, and evaluating effectiveness in terms appropriate to the problem structure.

Information as Influence: How Institutions Mediate the Impact of Scientific Assessments on Global Environmental Affairs

The recognition that information matters in world affairs raises a number of questions as to when, how, and under what conditions it influences the behavior of policy actors. Despite the vast and growing array of institutions involved in collecting, analyzing, and disseminating information potentially relevant to global governance generally, and global environmental change specifically, our understanding of the role that these “information institutions” play in world affairs remains limited. This paper examines how institutions mediate the impact of scientific assessments on global environmental affairs and highlights the pathways through which information has influence on the policy and politics of environmental issues. We identify salience, credibility and legitimacy as the critical attributions that different audiences make about an assessment that determine whether they will change their thoughts, decisions, and behavior in response to it. We also outline how institutional rules regarding participation, framing, and scope and content allow knowledge systems to reach needed thresholds of salience, credibility, and legitimacy and to balance the tradeoffs and tensions among them.

Technology Is Not Enough Climate Change, Population, Affluence, and Consumption

Reducing human emissions of carbon dioxide by 80% by 2100 requires more than technological innovation. Historical rates of emissions decline due to such innovation of about 0.7% are insufficient to offset the 3% growth in emissions that stems from population and per capita income growth. Existing scientific and political debates are dominated by a “technophilic optimism” that projects emission reductions from technological improvement that are not supported by the evidence. If we fail to develop policies proactively to constrain population, affluence, and consumption while respecting other human values, we will almost certainly face impacts from climate change that constrain population, affluence, and consumption for us.

Of Course International Institutions Matter: But When and How?

Research over the last decade by scholars of international relations and comparative politics has clearly demonstrated that international environmental institutions can produce quite dramatic changes in the behaviour of the states and nonstate actors that they seek to influence. Taken as a whole, that body of research has also demonstrated several other important points. First, it has shown that determining whether observed changes in behaviour were driven by the institution or by other, exogenous, factors is not a trivial problem. Second, it has shown that although there are many international environmental institutions (IEIs) that have been quite effective, others have wielded little if any influence. Third, it has begun to identify features of an IEI that promote effectiveness and features that tend to undercut it. Fourth, it has also begun to show how effectiveness depends not only on the features of the IEI but also on features of the problem being addressed, the broader international context and the countries whose behaviour the IEI seeks to influence. The research conducted to date has also demonstrated that IEIs wield influence both through rationalist mechanisms in which states engage in self-conscious processes of identifying and responding to material incentives and through constructivist mechanisms in which norms, identities and ideas play far more important roles than interests and power. One question that has yet to receive attention is how IEIs compare to other social efforts in their ability to induce positive environmental change, including through state policies outside of the IEI realm, through private corporate regimes, through the activities of nongovernmental organisations and civil society more generally and through epistemic communities.

Sources of Transparency

Transparency is crucial to the effectiveness of international regimes. Indeed, promoting transparency—fostering the acquisition, analysis, and dissemination of regular, prompt, and accurate regimerelevant information—is often one of the most important functions regimes perform. In many regimes, such information underpins efforts to alter state behavior and allows regime members to evaluate past progress in order to redesign the regime to perform better in the future. Yet, for all its nominal importance to regime success, many regimes fail to induce adequate transparency. Both anecdotal incidents—from Iraqi nuclear programs to years of clandestine Soviet whaling—and more systematic evaluations remind us that governments regularly fail to provide the timely and accurate reports mandated by most security, human rights, and environmental treaties. Nor do governments usually allow international organizations or other actors to collect independent information on treaty-relevant behavior. Even regime secretariats that have information often fail to analyze or disseminate it in ways that facilitate regime goals. In short, the necessity for transparency has not been the mother of its invention.

INTERNATIONAL CONTROL OF NUCLEAR PROLIFERATION: BEYOND CARROTS AND STICKS

The Nonproliferation Review/Fall 1997 40 Ronald B. Mitchell is an assistant professor in the Department of Political Science, University of Oregon. His book Intentional Oil Pollution at Sea: Environmental Policy and Treaty Compliance, published in 1994 by The MIT Press, received the 1995 International Studies Association Sprout Award for best book on international environmental politics. He has published articles in International Organization and The Journal of Theoretical Politics. INTERNATIONAL CONTROL OF NUCLEAR PROLIFERATION: BEYOND CARROTS AND STICKS

AN INTERNET-READY DATABASE FOR PROSPECTIVE RANDOMIZED CLINICAL TRIALS OF HIGH-DOSE-RATE BRACHYTHERAPY FOR ADENOCARCINOMA OF THE PROSTATE

PURPOSE To demonstrate a new interactive Internet-ready database for prospective clinical trials in high-dose-rate (HDR) brachytherapy for prostate cancer. METHODS AND MATERIALS An Internet-ready database was created that allows common data acquisition and statistical analysis. Patient anonymity and confidentiality are preserved. These data forms include all common elements found from a survey of the databases. The forms allow the user to view patient data in a view-only or edit mode. Eight linked forms document patient data before and after receiving HDR therapy. The pretreatment forms are divided into four categories: staging, comorbid diseases, external beam radiotherapy data, and signs and symptoms. The posttreatment forms separate data by HDR implant information, HDR medications, posttreatment signs and symptoms, and follow-up data. The forms were tested for clinical usefulness. CONCLUSION This Internet-based database enables the user to record and later analyze all relevant medical data and may become a reliable instrument for the follow-up of patients and evaluation of treatment results.