This is an excerpt from McGlinchey, Stephen. 2022. Foundations of International Relations (London: Bloomsbury). It is published here in tribute to the memory of the author, Professor Raul Pacheco-Vega, who died on 31 May 2026.
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Our planet carries approximately eight billion people. Yet its capacity to provide for each one of these individuals is threatened by population growth, climate change, deforestation, collapse of fisheries, desertification, air pollution and scarcity of fresh water. The full extent of our shared global environmental problems goes far beyond the well-publicised challenge of climate change. In fact, one of the elements often forgotten is the complicated relationship between human beings and their environment. In the early years of the conversation around environmental protection, some argued that the planet’s resources were there for our collective consumption. However, there are limits to growth and this raises a range of important global issues. The human population quadrupled between 1900 and 2000. This growth, which continues, coupled with abrupt climate change events and further compounded by rapid industrialisation and urban expansion, have put pressure on the capacity of Planet Earth to sustain life. Within the global system, the environment is one of the areas where much work remains to be done, particularly because cooperative approaches to environmental protection have had a mixed record despite the grave implications of failure.
Towards a global consensus
It is often hard to assess whether international cooperation efforts have had any real effect on society’s well-being, the quality of our environment or even the construction of long- term relationships between states. One form of evaluation takes place through the study of environmentally focused ‘megaconferences’. These large-scale events bring together representatives of national governments, intergovernmental secretariats, non-governmental organisations, academics and industry actors to engage in conversations about the state of the environment. They usually focus on a particular issue at hand. What makes these megaconferences interesting is that their goal is to engage in productive collaborative efforts to reach agreement and consensus on specific strategies to protect the environment and solve global challenges.
KEY TERMS: Climate change, biodiversity and sustainable development
Perhaps no issue is more international than climate change. The earth’s climate has never been constant. Yet, over the last century the effects of human activity – principally the burning of fossil fuels such as oil, coal and natural gas to fuel our economy and lifestyles – have driven global warming and a resulting large-scale shift in weather patterns. Climate change is a dynamic process that increases the severity of extreme weather events such as hurricanes, droughts and flooding as the earth continues to warm.
Biodiversity is a term that describes all the life forms on earth – in all their various forms, from the smallest bacteria, to plants, insects and the largest mammals. The different elements within earth’s biosphere rely on the others to survive. Due to industrialisation and human activity, biodiversity loss is reaching critical levels.
Sustainable development concerns retooling how a state’s development occurs so that it is cleaner, more aware of impacts on natural systems and produces fewer emissions and pollutants than in traditional industrial processes. This is all the more important as the large number of ‘developing’ states need to follow a development path in order to improve the lives and prosperity of their citizens and reduce poverty – much as the states of the Global North already have. If they do not do so sustainably then it will exacerbate climate change and biodiversity loss and endanger the health and security of future citizens.
Historically, the two environmental issues that have gained the most attention have been climate change and biodiversity. Both of these issues came up at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992 – formally called the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development. Nevertheless, most scholars will recall the 1972 United Nations Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment as the first large-scale environmentally focused megaconference. The Stockholm Conference was also the starting point for the first global coordination mechanism for environmental protection, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). This conference was also the first one where participants explicitly linked human health with environmental and ecosystem health in their discourses.
The second milestone in global environmental governance was the publication of the Brundtland Report in 1987. This report outlined the need for a new model for development that brought into play the notion that we cannot simply use (and misuse) the resources we have at our disposal. The new model, coined sustainable development, became an enduring part of the global conversation about environmental protection. The Brundtland Report defines sustainable development as having three main components: economic, environmental and social – an idea that was then put forward for implementation at the Earth Summit.
The third milestone was the aforementioned 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro. A major outcome of this meeting was the recognition of two of the most important environmental issues – the loss of biodiversity and rapid climate change – and the need for intergovernmental secretariats and agreements to respond to these twin challenges. The bulk of the world’s states, 161, signed a declaration on the need for a model of global development that enabled future generations to live within their means but also facilitated current generations’ livelihoods. The fact that so many states reached an agreement on the concept of sustainable development, and the need to operationalise it, became the key contribution of the Earth Summit. Activist involvement became the norm in international conferences on environmental issues starting with the Earth Summit. Non-governmental organisations were considered part of the negotiations from the very beginning and over 2,000 non-governmental representatives attended.
The fourth milestone was the 2002 Johannesburg World Summit on Sustainable Development. The goal was to establish collaborative intergovernmental, cross-disciplinary and cross-sectoral partnerships. In theory, this would strengthen the way in which environmental activists interact and partner with national governments. Different types of partnership were elucidated and non-state actors were considered from the design stage up to implementation. However, following the summit there was a widespread perception that there had been very little progress on the implementation side, leading to a feeling of megaconference fatigue. To remedy this, the 2012 UN Conference on Sustainable Development (also known as Rio+20) created mechanisms for follow-up of commitments to sustainable development. It also highlighted the relevance of specific targets for development and the need for transition towards broader-reaching sustainable development goals. Moreover, the outcome document of this conference defines specific regional initiatives towards the implementation of sustainable development.
Finally, the 2015 Paris Agreement represented a moment of consensus among virtually all the world’s states to put into place a long-term plan to address climate change. Among other things, it also established a global stocktaking process to be done every five years to monitor progress and make adjustments if needed. The fact that an agreement was reached was a landmark as prior negotiations were marked by disagreements on a strategy to compel states to reach internationally agreed targets on their carbon emissions. This is important as carbon dioxide, released primarily by burning fossil fuels for energy, is the main cause of global warming. Nevertheless, Paris showed that many states were able to agree on specific goals, targets and policies to combat climate change.
The Paris Agreement, whilst important, is not indicative of a single or comprehensive solution to climate change as much more needs to be done. Four important elements stand out, each of which indicates the challenges and opportunities ahead in dealing with climate change. Firstly, there is research (Broberg and Romera 2020) based on Article 8 of the Agreement that recognises that climate mitigation and adaptation strategies may not be sufficient. Consequently, mechanisms to help states deal with climate-induced losses and damage (such as flooding) are needed, together with funds and expertise to facilitate this. This reflects on the fact that although action is being taken to combat climate change, in the short and medium term the effects will still escalate and disproportionately affect the poorest and most exposed states.
Secondly, the role of the United States in global climate politics has shifted due to the mainstreaming of climate change denial in the Republican Party, one of America’s two major political parties (the other being the Democratic Party). When elected president, less than two years after the Paris Agreement, Donald Trump mainstreamed the already growing tide of climate denial. His rhetoric and his administration’s policies, such as his emphasis on coal, dampened efforts to address climate mitigation and adaptation targets and undermined conversations around decarbonisation strategies. This mainstreaming was watermarked when, after several years of speculation, Trump announced the withdrawal of the United States from the Paris Agreement in November 2019. Although the successor Biden administration reversed this in 2021, having the world’s most powerful state (and second biggest polluter behind China) mainstream climate denialism in its policymaking risks undermining global progress as the issue remains endemic in the Republican Party as we will explore later in the case study section.
The third element is the importance of ambition (Arroyo 2019; Röser et al. 2020). If states, cities, regions and communities approach climate policy in a way that remains close to the status quo instead of taking an ambitious and far-reaching approach, it is likely that we will not be able to reach our emissions and temperature targets within the timeframe that global agreements have proposed. This is closely related to a fourth development – an increased push for shifts in societal consumptive patterns (Alfredsson et al. 2018). Beyond the traditional conversations around the importance of reducing greenhouse gas emissions and developing adaptive strategies for cities and metropolitan regions, we have begun to witness a growing interest in changing how communities and societies consume, with a holistic goal of reducing emissions but also changing the ways in which commodity chains operate (Welch and Southerton 2019). Commodity chains are sequences of interconnected processes that firms use to develop goods (also called commodities). An example is the global coffee commodity chain. To have coffee on our tables we need to extract, transport, treat and process resources from all over the planet – even if the plantation is in, for example, Costa Rica.
There are different pathways for how to decide which goals in global climate governance should make it to domestic policies, but much of the work in International Relations (as outlined in previous chapters) has been focused on how globally popular, commonly held norms spread and diffuse across and within nations. Norm diffusion mechanisms suggest that internationally agreed goals and strategies to protect the environment can diffuse to nation-states and subnational governments through a broad range of informational strategies, human capital training, activist mobilisation, discourse building and consensus formation. In the climate governance field, the signing of the Paris Agreement appeared to signal global agreement on the importance of engaging in substantial collective action to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions (Held and Roger 2018). The bulk of scholars and policymakers agree that the importance of climate change as a global environmental issue is paramount, and therefore, we could argue that there is a global norm around a global strategy for emissions reductions that is slowly diffusing. If this logic holds in the way that other important norms have held internationally, the effects of shorter term setbacks, such as the United States’ example during the Trump administration, will not be sufficient to change global momentum over the longer run.
Climate change is not the only ecological issue facing our planet. But its role in catalysing global action to protect the environment cannot be overstated. One of the most neglected issues is water. While the earth is two-thirds covered by water, the proportion that is freshwater (drinkable and usable for agriculture) is sometimes highly contested and in short supply for growing populations. One example of this is disputes over how (and where) water that runs across national boundaries is used and managed. For example, Pakistan and India have been in dispute over allocations of water from rivers that run across both states. Similar issues have arisen over the River Nile in north-eastern Africa, as explored in Chapter nine. When added to the effects of climate change, which can exacerbate drought conditions in one area and flooding in another, water is an issue of international concern. There has been some progress in developing global strategies for groundwater governance, for sustainable access and allocation, and for a nexus (water-energy-food) approach to managing water – but a unified global water governance framework is still to emerge. Two major obstacles that prevent this approach are the diversity of water usages and the multiplicity of stakeholders and actors across national boundaries that have an interest in how water is allocated, used and reused. Hence, addressing this issue will likely form one of the next major international challenges.
The environment as a global commons
The notion of public goods comes from the original definition of a good that is non-excludable and non-rivalrous. Think of it as something that anyone can access at any point in time without making it any less available for anyone else to consume. The best example of a public good is knowledge; in this case we can use the example of information that we find on the internet. All knowledge, once freed and put online for public consumption, is non-excludable and non-rivalrous in consumption. You cannot exclude anyone from consuming knowledge and learning, unless they do not have access to the means for knowledge transmission, which may be the case in some countries where specific websites are banned. You also experience non-rivalry in consumption. Air is another example of a public good. Under normal circumstances nobody can stop you from breathing air into your lungs, and the fact that you breathe air does not stop someone else from having the opportunity to enjoy it. This is the definition of a perfect public good: one that is always non-rivalrous in consumption and non-excludable in access.
KEY TERMS: The resource curse
Being blessed with resources may be regarded as a wholly positive affair, giving a state vast riches under their land by virtue of the luck of their geography amplified by scientific and engineering developments. For example, when Saudi Arabia became a nation-state in 1932, they had no idea they were sitting on some of the world’s largest pools of oil. Oil was not discovered there until 1938. Yet, such riches can also have negative consequences if not managed well. Addressing this, the concept of the ‘resource curse’ is defined as the negative effect that such natural resource wealth has on governance. States that are rich in minerals are often considered to be facing such a curse, because there is enormous interest on the part of outside entities to come into that territory, establish industrial mining operations and extract minerals from underground ores to process them into finished products or components. This can lead to corruption that diverts government attention away from the needs of its citizens and instead towards the centralisation of power and personal enrichment. Such scenarios have a negative impact on development – both economically and politically – that can affect a state for generations. In that sense, the ‘curse’ is not inevitable. But it does reflect the experiences of a significant number of newly formed nation-states in the twentieth century who found themselves blessed with valuable riches before they had developed robust political institutions, especially across the Global South.
Common pool resource theory derives from Hardin (1968), who said that if left to our own devices we would exhaust all the resources available for our consumption. Imagine if you were a shrimp fisher. You need to fish and sell your catch to sustain your family. Let’s say that there are 10,000 shrimp available in the small catchment in which you fish. But there are 99 other fishers in the sea at the same time as you. If everyone cooperated and consumed only one-hundredth of the total available shrimp, each would have 100 shrimp to sell. If at any point any fisher catches more than a hundredth, there will be other fishers negatively affected. Hardin used a similar metaphor to make the point that if resource consumers behave selfishly, they would exhaust the resources they were supposed to preserve. Hardin called this the tragedy of the commons. Closed bodies of water, plots of land and large-scale areas of forests are all common pool resources. They are rivalrous in consumption, but non-excludable.
One can summarise the theory of common pool resources by placing goods in four specific categories: private goods, common goods, club goods and public goods. This categorisation framework has two dimensions. The first dimension is excludability. If you can prevent someone from accessing a good, that good is excludable. The second dimension is rivalry in consumption. Goods that are depleted are rivalrous in consumption. If I consume an apple, you cannot consume that same apple because I have already eaten it. Private goods, such as food, clothing and other material objects, can be purchased and acquired because they are tradable. As a result, these goods are both rivalrous in consumption (if I buy a car, nobody else can buy that exact same car) and excludable (you cannot buy a car unless you have the money to purchase it).
Goods that are non-rivalrous in consumption and non-excludable are called public goods. These are the things that everybody can enjoy. Consuming them does not reduce the possibility of someone else having the same opportunity of consumption. Air is a public good. Everybody can breathe air without worrying that at some point they will not be able to breathe simply because somebody else is also breathing. Finally, common goods, which are also called common pool resources, are those goods that are non- excludable but rivalrous in consumption.: fish in a fishery, trees in a forest, water in an aquifer or a lake. All these natural resources are common goods and, therefore, common pool resources.
KEY INSIGHTS: Forests
Forests are one way to see how a resource can be viewed as a global commons. For example, the Amazon is a rainforest that spans nine states in Latin America – with the bulk (60 per cent) within Brazil. Preserving forests as vast as this, sometimes described as ‘the lungs of the earth’, are instrumental in any future climate mitigation as trees, and all plants for that matter, absorb cardon dioxide from the air as a food source. In that sense, the more trees there are, the more carbon we can remove and store naturally in trees. Conversely, when one state (such as Brazil) takes a path of clearing large areas of the Amazon (for agriculture and mining, predominantly) it is a local action that has global implications.
What makes common pool resources so interesting is that the theory, developed by Elinor Ostrom (1990), argues that despite the fact that humans are supposed to be selfish, faced with conditions of scarcity we are able to self-organise and govern our common pool resources (our ‘commons’) in a sustainable manner. One of the reasons why Ostrom’s work had such an impact was because her theory of cooperative approaches to resources governance contradicted Hardin’s tragedy of the commons model. Instead of being so selfish that they would want to fish all the shrimp (for example), Ostrom found that fishers would build a shared agreement to reduce their own consumption for the well-being of the collective. Obviously, this is an example on a relatively small scale. What remains to be seen is whether we can upscale this into global cooperation.
Perhaps you would agree that a shared environment would be a resource community and individuals would work collaboratively to protect it. But there is another view, which is that responsibility for care of the environment rests with state governments. One way of thinking about this is to use the concept of the global environment as a global commons. After all, global environmental problems are by their very nature global. However, international cooperation is hard to achieve. As the example of the United States shows, there are powerful states that will (from time to time) avoid or withdraw cooperation for various reasons. It is hard to make states commit to specific conservation goals (in forest policy) or emission-reduction targets (in climate policy) or standards for pollution in rivers (in water policy) because each state has its own development objectives that may conflict with such goals, thus making it hard to find common ground for collaboration. Hence, a state’s refusal to collaborate to solve an international issue is always concerning, but never surprising. Because of shifting state-level priorities, international collaboration on key environmental issues remains limited.
Global and domestic policy responses
The right to a healthy environment and the global commons are ideas that suggest that it is our shared duty to take care of our collective environment because everyone has a right to enjoy their environment and use some of its resources for their survival. It is. possible to link human rights with global environmental regulation through the implementation of the international norm of a right to a healthy environment. Despite states having different abilities and varying degrees of technical expertise to implement the norm, the number of countries with constitutional environmental rights has expanded radically. No fewer than eighty states have now passed such legislation domestically, but we are still quite a long way away from having this norm as a fundamental human right. There is some evidence that a number of environmentally related norms have been emerging, such as a collective agreement on the pollution levels that microplastics bring along, but other norms have not yet achieved this degree of relevance across the board.
There has sometimes been a tendency to see environmental legislation as damaging to economic growth and prosperity. This can make it unpopular in domestic settings, making legislation difficult to pass – or even propose in some cases. Indeed, this was one of the key reasons for Trump’s climate scepticism, particularly in regard to the Paris Agreement. Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro also took the same line by promoting (or overlooking) the large-scale clearing of land in the Amazon rainforest for agriculture during his presidency. There are, of course, many other concerns that divert government focus from environmental issues. Increasing regulation on certain heavy-polluting industries, such as steel and coal, can have a negative effect on jobs. Setting ‘green’ taxes – such as a tax on carbon emissions – either directly or through such measures as energy tariffs, can also cause a burden on taxpayers and businesses. Recent developments, such as the idea of the Green New Deal, have highlighted the importance of economic incentives to push forward greener, more environmentally friendly measures. Should such measures take hold, when added to the number of countries where the human right to a healthy environment is already enacted constitutionally, may help build better collaborative transnational networks to protect the global commons.
Sharing a paradigm that pushes the human right to a healthy environment may also induce governments to actively seek participation in international environmental agreements. Nevertheless, it is important to find a way to coordinate these agreements, and this challenge raises the question of whether we need a global environmental organisation to make sure states comply. Given that collaboration between states is so difficult, international environmental agreements attempt to build a framework to help states talk to each other and agree on specific targets for environmental protection. Some of the most well-known international environmental agreements are specific to the area of climate change, but other less well-known examples – such as the Aarhus Convention on Access to Information, Public Participation in Decision-Making and Access to Justice in Environmental Matters – are equally relevant. States that are signatories to the Aarhus Convention make an agreement to share data that will enable their citizens to understand the potential risks that they face with regard to the processing and emissions of industrial chemicals. This information helps environmental activists bring industries to account and ensure that they reduce their polluting emissions.
You may recall from earlier in the chapter that there is now a consensus regarding one specific tool that may help achieve the goal of providing global public goods: international environmental agreements. These agreements, often produced at megaconferences, help protect our global commons by requiring nations to acknowledge and respect the human right to a healthy environment. However, the next big question is addressing who is in charge of implementing these international environmental accords. Some have argued that in order to compel states to cooperate in the protection of our shared environment, a global intergovernmental secretariat should be created whose sole purpose would be coordinating efforts to improve environmental quality. For many years there was a collective belief that the United Nations Environment Programme had been tasked with the challenge of protecting our global network of ecosystems and shared resources. This may have been true in the early stages of its creation following the 1972 Stockholm Conference, but protecting our global environment has proved to be an impossible task for a small agency with a limited budget and no power to compel states to act.
The reality is that even though there is increasing interest in strengthening global cooperation across states to protect the global environment, it is the number of institutions, agencies and programmes dealing with environmental issues at other levels that grows in size and complexity. And while there is still no agreement as to whether the United Nations Environment Programme is the agency that should be tasked with protecting the global environment or whether we should create a more substantial global environmental organisation, it is important to keep a focus on collective solutions at the international level rather than state, regional or local level. The example of the 2015 Paris Agreement, which built on the example of earlier megaconferences and movements, suggests that international collaboration to protect our environment may be on the rise, but there is still much more work to do.
Donald Trump and climate denial
One of the most challenging issues facing our global environmental governance model is the predominance of a specific state, the United States, in the international discourse and global policy arena. The United States, reflecting its disproportionately influential global position, has used that influence to drive international environmental politics in some arenas over recent decades. Yet it has also been inconsistent – or perhaps even negligent – in other arenas. This issue is compounded by the fact that the United States (second to China) is the world’s second-largest emitter of the greenhouse gases that drive climate change. It is important to realise the risks in such a situation where one state is so influential – especially if the internal politics of that state should shift and its leadership become absent. Indeed, this allows us to also consider effects not just at the state level, but to consider the impact of one individual, Donald Trump, and his preferences on shaping global climate progress during his four-year term in office.
There is no question that a state leader with a strong personality can have an impact on global politics (see De Pryck and Gemenne 2017). Charisma, personality, wisdom, intelligence and being able to articulate a vision are all individual traits that can drive the way in which a message is passed on. For example, the joint announcement of then-US President Barack Obama and Chinese Premier Xi Jinping in September 2015 that they would both formally join the Paris Agreement was emblematic of the power of charisma and leadership gravitas to push the agreement over the line and secure the support of other more reluctant states. Nevertheless, individual personalities are not the only domestic sources of influence in international environmental politics. There are hundreds, perhaps even thousands of participants in global negotiations around every single environmental issue, from marine protected areas to the international carriage of hazardous waste, from climate change to biodiversity to bio-accumulable chemicals.
One of the reasons why Trump has had so much influence on global climate politics is because he unilaterally chose to leave the Paris Agreement and effectively terminate all substantive participation by the United States of America in global climate negotiations (see MacNeil and Paterson 2020). In doing so, Trump manifested an environmental sceptic’s view, meaning that he did not seem to believe. that climate change was worth his attention, or his state’s actions. Environmental sceptics typically believe that any kind of collective concern about the impacts of industrial and human activities on ecosystems’ health is overhyped or is a hoax by scientists and politicians. In line with this, Trump tweeted in 2012 that ‘the concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make US manufacturing non-competitive’. A range of other statements pointed to his lack of belief that climate change is driven by human activity, is widely exaggerated by scientists and that mitigating it is not worth the costs. Trump also actively worked to undermine the regulatory role of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) within the United States, arguing that such domestic agencies have a negative impact on business by producing too much regulation (commonly known as ‘red tape’).
Applying Trump’s personal views more broadly within the phenomenon, climate sceptics (or deniers) do not believe the scientific consensus on climate change. Some do not believe it is occurring at all due to a misunderstanding between local weather and global climate (pointing to instances of cold winters for example) while others believe that it is occurring but is not driven by human activity. What most sceptics have in common is a rejection of attempts to change human and industrial behaviour. In addition to denial over the science, such global mandates also raise legitimacy issues at the political level for such thinkers as they tend to come from ideological positions that reject the authority of international agreements or organisations – seeing such attempts as tyrannical or illegitimate. Climate scepticism is therefore a cultural issue, more than just a political one (Dunlap, McCright and Yarosh 2016; Hoffman 2011).
Clearly, then, Trump is just one voice in an established discourse. This discourse is especially prevalent in the United States and the Republican Party where such thinking has become mainstream. Yet, because of the place of the United States in the global system, the unique ways that Trump wielded his executive power and his mastery of the media, Trump has had an undeniable effect on global discourse around climate change policy negotiations. When we are confronted with such marked political polarisation and strong domestic opposition to a global norm, as well as a powerful leader with a counterpoint view of the issue, a countervailing process emerges. This can be seen as follows: the counter-norm of climate scepticism works against the global consensus. In this case, that global consensus was the one agreed in 2015, at that time with the backing of the United States. Considering this from a normative framework, Trump’s reversal was not just a domestic policy shift. Due to his unique impact, his actions have effectively mainstreamed climate denialism – something that was already well established before his election, but operating at a peripheral level.
Recalling the norm life cycle first explored in Chapter seven, Trump’s example does not mean that climate denialism is so globally diffused that it has countered the already existing norm supporting international cooperation towards global climate change action and emissions reductions (Matthews 2015). For example, it took several decades and multiple acrimonious diplomatic encounters for the consensus of 2015 to be reached. We will have to wait for more time to pass to see the extent to which Trump’s singular actions diffuse through the global system, but the International Relations’ toolkit gives us the means to track this. If Trump’s actions cause a cascade and become internalised, resulting in other states coming to follow his example, then any future global climate agreement is certainly going to be materially different, if it exists at all. This will be measurable beyond his presidency, as it has already been established that these views do not originate with Trump, but rather that he mainstreamed them. Yet it seems that few other global leaders have followed Trump’s example. And, following Trump’s defeat in the 2020 presidential election, the successor Biden administration swiftly rejoined the Paris Agreement.
Governing extraction
Resource endowment is not spread evenly, it is mostly the luck of geography. Some states are rich, for example, in oil. Others have substantially large deposits of metal-rich minerals that are discovered under their soil and accessed through modern mining technology. There has been much interest in state resource endowments as pathways to prosperity in the economic development field. But it is only more recently that we have begun to pay more attention to how the dynamics of cross-state resource extraction has an impact not only on domestic governance conditions but also on the global system. Companies that engage in resource extraction in a state different to their own seek to benefit from the natural endowments of the target states. This does not always result in an equitable arrangement and has led to a concept known as the resource curse (see Box 19.3). This is exacerbated historically as during the colonial period, colonial powers often extracted vast amounts of wealth from the territory under their control. In the modern day, private companies are sometimes directly, or indirectly, connected to (or contracted by) a state, which raises some of the neocolonial critiques that we have explored earlier in the book.
Mining activities provide materials that enable the production of many of our most prized and important possessions – such as smartphones. However, they also have environmental impacts that are strongly differentiated. Extracting as an activity is as invasive as it sounds. Industrial plants with heavy machinery drill into the very surface of the Earth to extract minerals or other geological materials. Similar activities also take place over water by pulling large amounts of fish out of the depth of the oceans and other bodies of water. Bottling companies drill wells from which they can extract spring water to transform it into bottled water. This process is called ‘commodification’.
Extractive activities can have impacts for much longer than their period of operation and this is particularly true of mining, which has the potential to start and sustain serious social disputes with affected communities. But even more concerning, mines can have extensive and long-term negative impacts on the environment. Polluted rivers, accumulating mountains of solid toxic waste, and effects on human health in workers and surrounding communities are just a few examples of these by-products of mineral extractive industries. Examples across the globe abound but in the modern era they are more prevalent in the developing countries of the Global South.
In Mexico, community groups have been battling against Newmont Goldcorp, a Canadian company, over the installation and operation of its Peñasquito Polymetallic Mine. Opening in 2010 in the state of Zacatecas, it is the world’s fifth-largest silver mine and also holds significant deposits of gold and other minerals. This is an analytically rich case to consider because there are groups that oppose the installation of the mine, but there are numerous other stakeholders interested in making sure that the mine remains active due to the economic benefits it brings. This tension between economic well-being and environmental and public health damage is made even more visible when considering the global–local interconnections.
What is important for some groups at the local level is to have access to jobs, and the mine does provide a number of these, both direct and ancillary through other services that supply the mine and its workers. In contrast, other stakeholders are more interested in reducing the potential for negative ecosystem impacts, including species loss, deforestation, toxic chemicals and airborne particulate matter. In that sense, the idea of the environment (or climate) being global is only way to appreciate, or look at, issues such as these. The truth is, however, that (as indicated earlier in the chapter) such issues are operationally a state-level phenomenon that have their roots at the individual and group level.
There are many issues worth discussing in such a case as this, but there two main areas of interest. The first is the apparent disconnect between global corporate governance and local community struggles. Because mining companies are usually multinationals operating in foreign countries under various schemes, including subsidiaries, the domestic regulatory framework has limited effectiveness regarding what state regulators can do to force mining companies to comply with local environmental laws. Even at the domestic level, it is hard to make companies comply with legal requirements, emissions standards and cleaner production process guidelines. An example of this phenomenon is the case of the Buenavista del Cobre, a mine operated by Grupo México in Cananea, in the northern Mexican state of Sonora. In 2014, this facility had a toxic spill of about 40 million litres of copper sulphate into two Mexican rivers, the Bacanuchi and the Sonora. This accident reportedly affected more than 22,000 people. Five years later, these people and their families continue to face medical bills and health challenges that ought to be paid by either corporate insurance or directly by the company itself.
Such a case raises the charge that mining companies have a duty, if not legal, then certainly ethical, to protect their surrounding environment. Protective strategies that have emerged include ecosystems protection, water treatment, mechanisms for air quality protection, wildlife management strategies and waste governance. Yet, the bulk of these vary widely as they are within the purview of each state – and not all states evenly enforce the laws and regulations that exist. One potential pathway for addressing this is for mining companies to engage in corporate social responsibility strategies, which are developing across industries, including mining (see Hamann 2003). This is predicated as a response from such industries and corporations to a global call for environmental sustainability and a quest for reduced impact on communities, societies and regions. There is an implicit understanding that it has the potential to make companies more sustainable and humane. However, corporate social responsibility is not a panacea that will automatically achieve reductions in pollutant emissions, create spaces for best practice or develop responsible citizens, enterprises and corporations.
Going beyond leaving the setting of standards to corporations and states, an international framework would set a normative (and possibly legal) expectation for companies to act with more responsibility for the longer- and shorter-term impacts of their extractive activities. Further, if a global environmental intergovernmental secretariat was established, we could infer that this agency would ensure that coordination across policy sectors and issue areas occurs and that there is a multidisciplinary group of people looking at the installation and operation of mines, such as those in Mexico mentioned above.
Conclusion
Developing new, and improving existing, ways to tackle environmental and climate challenges requires better integration between international initiatives and domestic policy strategies. This means creating the conditions for a model of governing the environment that is flexible and cuts across different levels, from the local to the global. It is also clear that frameworks based on ideas of global public goods and global commons are useful to aid our understandings of the shared opportunities and risks we face within the global system. However, at the same time it is important to recognise that these debates are daunting – and a rising tide of denial is perhaps an understandable, if unhelpful, reaction to this. Collective action on any scale, especially climate change, is an enormous challenge for humankind, the likes of which we have not faced in our history. Trying to find mechanisms, models and strategies to ensure cooperation across different levels of government, across a broad variety of issue areas and across a range of political and policy actors is a problematic and difficult process, as experience has shown. But the hope is that progress may continue, despite evident setbacks, and consolidate so we can all live healthily and happily on Planet Earth.