Markets in ecosystem services have the potential to provide financial incentives to protect the environment either in lieu of or in addition to more traditional regulatory programmes. If these markets function properly, they can provide enhanced levels of environmental quality or more efficient mechanisms for protecting natural resources that provide vital services to humans. The theoretical benefits of ecosystem services markets may be undercut, however, if care is not taken in creating the legal infrastructure that supports trading to ensure that trades actually provide the promised environmental benefits. This article identifies five essential pillars of an ecosystem services market regime that are necessary to provide operational accountability safeguards. These include financial safeguards, verifiable performance standards, transparency and public participation standards, regulatory oversight mechanisms, and rule of law safeguards. The article assesses whether the laws of the United States (US) and European Union (EU) are well designed to provide such accountability. It concludes that despite recognition of the risk of market manipulation and outright fraud, regulators in the US and the EU to date have responded to these risks largely in an ad hoc and incomplete fashion, rather than embedding the mechanisms for operational accountability discussed in this article into the regulatory framework that governs ecosystem services trading markets.

This article examines the cultural-based critiques of the international human rights paradigm generally and children's rights in particular, with specific reference to Africa. In this regard, the paper attempts to identify gaps in the analyses of the African Charter on the Rights and Welfare of the Child. Towards that end, the paper proceeds in three parts. In the first section, it situates the discussion within the general framework of children's rights at international law. In the next section, it turns to an examination of the culture-based critiques of the idea of universal rights. Finally, in the fourth and fifth sections, it analyses the documents and literature that focus on the rights and welfare of the child. In the concluding section, the author raises several important questions regarding the propriety of this special category of human rights in the African context.

Because of its tremendous temporal and spatial scope, climate change poses profound regulatory issues. Significant transboundary effects and spatially differentiated effects make it highly desirable that international regulatory mechanisms are utilised in order to arrive at effective mitigation and adaptation solutions. Yet, the different spaces that states occupy in terms of causation and effect makes agreement on what must be regulated through international mechanisms and indeed how to regulate such subject matter. Consequently, this paper proposes that legitimacy needs to be considered one of the core concerns of international climate change regulation and governance. The aim of this paper is to clarify the role of the concept of legitimacy in international climate change regulation, and to set forth a specific discursive approach aimed at identifying legitimacy-enhancing design features for internationally regulating climate change.

No abstract

Whereas the Convention on the Rights of the Child ('the CRC') provides a progressive framework capable of normative transformation, the challenge for children's rights advocates is how to translate the treaty's prescriptions into robust protection for children everywhere. A key indicator of success in this endeavour is the level and sustainability of appropriation of the CRC's principles in the local polities that have subscribed to its normative framework. In this article, I adopt culture and rights as tools for analysing the contexts, contests, processes and prospects that define such transformation.