Suchergebnisse

This article examines the diversity of opinions that exists within the ENGO community regarding their diagnoses of environmental problems and their preferred solutions to them. It provides a conceptual framework that consists of two components: values and governance approaches. Different values include ecological sustainability, distributive equity and economic efficiency. Governance approaches target states, international regimes, communities and markets as alternative loci for institutional solutions to environmental problems. The framework is used to illuminate salient patterns of conflict and coalitional behavior and to project future trends in global environmental politics.

Garrett Hardin's "tragedy of the commons" metaphor is commonly invoked to account for the unfortunate state of world fisheries. But the world s oceans are no longer a global commons and have not been so for the past two decades. Open-access regimes have persisted within many exclusive economic zones (EEZs) during this time, but coastal states' authority to regulate domestic fisheries has existed for more than a generation. Faced with the prospect of Hardin's tragedy, coastal states have had more than twenty years to devise institutional constraints that would prevent it. This article asserts that the dismal experience with EEZs is in large part attributable to distributive bargaining problems that arose within coastal states in the wake of EEZ extension. Moreover, the article argues that high levels of uncertainty that characterize the early stages of institutional development have exacerbated these problems. Finally, the article demonstrates how the variety of institutional designs and paths of institutional development that are observed in the cases of Iceland, Norway, and Atlantic Canada result from the different configurations of political power and political structure within each case. While the empirical discussion is focused upon property rights and fisheries, the theoretical discussion of bargaining and uncertainty has widespread application across comparative and international politics.