Suchergebnisse

The European Union is one of the earliest regions that commits to environmental protection and is also the conventional leader of global environmental governance. China is now in urgent need to govern environment and a key player in dealing with a number of global environmental challenges, including climate change. Since 1981, when the European Union and China began to contact in the field of environment, environment has been rising on the agenda of their bilateral relations. In 1994, the European Union and China established their first institution for environment. With the support of institutions, their environmental cooperation has stepped into width and depth. Today, environment is deeply involved in the Asia-Europe Meeting and the Annual Summit between the European Union and China, and a number of sectoral institutions on environmental policy, environmental technology, climate change, and energy have been established. Meanwhile, a considerable number of environmental projects have been implemented. The institutions do not only assist in the implementation of environmental projects, but also result in new institutions and the construction of the institutional architecture. However, they also experience some limits. Due to the "low-politics" stance of environment in global politics, the European and Chinese leaders are half-hearted to the practical operation of some of the institutions. In addition, these institutions are also ineffective in dealing with issues with conflictual interests involved, such as climate change and environmental technology transfer.

In this article, I discuss trust and its manifestations in international environmental cooperation. A lack of trust in the capacity of states and other actors to tackle environmental issues leads to international environmental insecurity. Awareness of such incapacities is widespread and is increasing in `modern risk societies'. Trust is often understood as the rational and intentional efforts of parties to treat one another as trustworthy counterparts and to ignore discretion, but it is also habitual. Trust is based on the socialization of agents into certain practices. The importance of trust and its different dimensions emerged as the central theme in a study of international environmental cooperation in northwestern Russia. Russian and Nordic participants were interviewed in the winter 2003—2004 and spring 2006 with the aim of gathering their views and experiences on cooperation. The interviewees were mainly representatives of regional and national administrations and non-governmental organizations. In addition, in the autumn of 2004 and again in the autumn of 2006, a questionnaire was sent to project managers working in northwestern Russia. The article highlights the importance of the institutional dimension of trust in terms of trust in abstract expertise and monetary systems as well as trust in the representatives of such systems. Both trust and the lack of trust remain important issues, especially in regard to the Russian capacity to develop domestic environmental policies and to improve the status of Russia in international environmental cooperation.