COPing with Consent: Law-Making Under Multilateral Environmental Agreements

Abstract

The growing sense of urgency regarding various global environmental problems has prompted calls for global legislative processes that could produce binding outcomes. However, as law-making gravitates into international forums, questions are raised regarding the legitimacy of international environmental governance. Much law-making today occurs under multilateral environmental agreements (‘MEAs’), such as the Climate Change Convention and its Kyoto Protocol. The article examines the role of Conferences of the Parties (‘COPs’) in MEA-based law-making. It juxtaposes the standard conception of international law-making and an alternative account, which sees law-making not simply as crystallized in formal consent procedures but as continuous interactional processes. The interactional account can help build the foundations for legitimate international environmental governance, and can provide important guidance to law-makers, even as they, even as they continue to operate within a formal, consent-based framework.

Earth system governance: a research framework

“…At the international level, the term 'global governance' is often used to describe processes of modern world politics, although also here no consensus on the appropriate definition has been reached (Young 1999;Commission on Global Governance 1995;Rosenau 1995;Kanie and Haas 2004;Biermann and Pattberg 2008). The concept of governance is mirrored in legal science, where scholars observe an evolution from an international law based on explicit state consent to an administrative law system with merely implicit state consent (e.g., Kingsbury et al 2005;Krisch 2006;Brunnée 2002) and from single to pluralist sites and actors of governance (Krisch 2006) and to multilevel systems of governance and complex hybrid public-private international law systems (Sornarajah 2006;Sourgens 2007). Importantly, from the local to international levels, the concept of governance is not confined to states and governments as sole actors, but is marked by participation of myriad public and private non-state actors at all levels of decision-making, ranging from networks of experts, environmentalists and multinational corporations to new agencies set up by governments, such as intergovernmental bureaucracies.…”

The Effectiveness and Legitimacy of International Environmental Institutions

“…Many authors implicitly or explicitly find that attaining democracy at the international level is neither desirable nor possible, given the fact that a demos, a community of individuals, is lacking at that level (Bodansky 1999;Brunne´e 2002). Susan Marks, however, has proposed that the 'principle of democratic inclusionÕ, which she develops, be recognized as a principle of international law.…”

Forests in International Law

“…79 See Wolfrum and Matz (2003), p. 11. 80 See for more detail Brunnée (2002) and Wiersema (2009). 81 This is done as well by , using a "consistency assessment" and a "compatibility assessment", pp.…”