AREA OF RESEARCH
For more information please see my Resume.
The 1990s have been marked by a remarkable upsurge of interest in, and
concern for, the state of the global environment. This interest is no
longer confined to a few committed ecologists and fewer specialized
researchers. Environmentalism has taken on the dimensions of a truly
global movement-arguably the only one of its kind-with concern being
expressed from politicians, academics, business leaders, community
leaders, and ordinary citizens from every corner of the world. While,
indeed, the movement has its share of sloganeering, fadism, and rhetoric
and while the specific environmental priorities of a `green' politician in
Europe, a `green' industrialist in Japan, a `green' consumer in the
United States, and a `green' activist in the Amazon may differ
substantively, the truly global nature of the movement is validated by
an underlying common realization that the way we have been doing things
may be unsustainable and that the changes we need can only come through collective global action.
The global attention that the environment has been receiving is both
compelling and deserving. The environmental crisis poses a new and
unique challenge to the existing state-centric international system in
the dimensions of both the problems and the potential solutions, because
a) the environment does not recognize any state-borders; b) the key
decision-makers in this case are not necessarily governmental actors;
and c) most environmental issues are clouded in thick scientific
uncertainty. While the number of nuclear missiles in the world are
conceivably controlled by the decisions of a handful of identifiable
actors in a few key countries, the same is not true for human or
ecological numbers. What we are dealing with here are the most
individual, sometimes the survival, decisions of disperse, individual
actors-parents in Bangladesh, pastoralists in Sudan, consumers in
Canada, peasants in Peru, automobile drivers in Germany. What is more,
in myriad complex ways, each of these decisions will ultimately affect
the overall balance of the world's ecological well-being. Compounding
all this is the climate of scientific and technical uncertainty under
which much of environmental policy has to be made.
The global environmental crisis confronts the international system with a unique and daunting challenge. First, while the cardinal organizing structure of international policy is the nation-state, the ecological reality does not recognize any state borders-pollutants require no visas to travel from England to Germany. Second, while the principal actors in international decisionmaking are national governments, the key `environmental decisionmakers' in the world are predominantly nongovernmental-ranging from multinational corporations to consumer groups to individual users of natural resources, i.e. the peasant, the pastoralist, the fuelwood gatherer. Third, the magnitude of the problems and of the uncertainty associated with them makes international environmental policy a prime target for the politicization of science-the danger of good science falling victim to popular rhetoricization and political expediency becomes all too real. In short, in studying international environmental policy we are confronted with a situation where not only are the `powers that are' unwilling to take assertive policy steps, but where they are very often incapable of doing so for lack of scientific uncertainty and are, moreover, often not the actors whose actions count the most. It is a situation, then, where understanding the science of environmental problems is not enough. It is imperative to understand the politics of the environment, and moreover to map the way the science and the politics are intertwined.
The existing international system-born amidst the ashes of two world wars and shaped by the simmering mistrust generated by the cold war-is eminently illqualified to tackle something of the proportion of the global environmental crisis by itself. The very nature of the problem at hand demands a new way of seeing and doing thing. A new way of practicing international politics-including new actors, introducing new fora, infusing a new agenda. In essence, changing the practice of international politics so that it includes not only a few diplomats but private actors ranging from corporate to grassroots representatives; so that it is limited not only to inter-state deliberations but inter-people dialogue which embraces scientific, economic, social and cultural concerns; so that it defines as its mandate not merely the security concerns of nations but the survival concerns of individual people (present and future), and ultimately the planet.
Defined broadly, my graduate research at the MIT's Department of Urban Studies and Planning has centered on the emerging responses of the international system to the mounting environmental challenges. More specifically, I have focused on what may be called the North-South (industrialized-developing country) aspects of international environmental politics and policy. Descriptively, I have concentrated on global conference diplomacy and treaty negotiations which have, in fact, attempted to bring in a larger diversity of nonstate actors, interests, and issues to the international negotiation table.
Prescriptively, I have been looking at the prospects of such attempts,
strategies to improve their effectiveness, and the role of the various
state and nonstate actors in actually implementing the commitments made
at these global gatherings.
In undertaking all of the above, I am the usual methods of case studies and literature analysis along with a complex negotiation simulation--the so-called `MIT Chlorine Negotiation Game'--essentially as a tool for studying the behavior of developing countries in international environmental policymaking.