Environmental Diplomacy: Negotiating More Effective Global Agreements.

Stevenson, Hayley

Environmental Diplomacy: Negotiating More Effective Global Agreements, 2nd ed. By Lawrence E. Susskind and Saleem H. Ali. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015.

Twenty years have passed since the first edition of this text was published. Environmental diplomacy has certainly had a mixed record during this period: states have managed to negotiate hundreds of agreements and protocols, but too often these agreements fail to genuinely improve the myriad problems that beset our planet. The core premise of this book is that process matters. Susskind and Ali identify four procedural shortcomings that are undermining global environmental negotiations. These concern major power dominance and the marginalization of smaller states and nonstate actors; states' self-serving use of science; inadequate linkages among environmental concerns and different policy areas; and inadequate monitoring and enforcement. Following two introductory and overview chapters, the book is structured to analyze each of these shortcomings in turn. A concluding chapter then presents a set of recommendations for improving environmental negotiations.

For a twenty-year update, one might expect more than a light-touch revision. Much of the text is verbatim from the first edition, resulting in examples predominantly from the 1980s and early 1990s. There is also little engagement with more recent scholarship. Chapter 3, for example, provides no update to the discussion of representing future generations; it relies exclusively on a 1989 text, despite the considerable amount of new scholarship on this topic.

This book introduces the reader to some important aspects of international environmental negotiations. It is clear that the audience is not fellow scholars of global environmental politics, but rather practitioners and students of environmental diplomacy. However, I suspect that most of this audience is more likely to dip in and out of academic books rather than read them from cover to cover. The structure of this book is not especially well suited to such a reading style, in particular the introductions to each chapter tend not to reveal the key arguments or provide a roadmap of how the narrative will develop.

Much of the material and recommendations covered in this second edition are certainly still highly relevant. However, the book would have been made considerably stronger if it reflected more on developments over the past two decades in both the practice and research of environmental diplomacy.