Regimes in Global Environmental Governance and the Internationalization of the State: The Case of Biodiversity Politics

Abstract

Scholarly debates on the relative (in-)effectiveness of global environmental governance increasingly focus on problems of cooperation across regime boundaries and on the missing knowledge base for such interlinkages. Global environmental change and related politics are increasingly seen as taking place in a complex field in which several ecological processes are interlinked -e.g. climate change, biodiversity, water, and land-use change -and these processes are deeply interconnected with societal processes, such as food supply and nutrition and the economic and financial crisis. We argue that institutionalist approaches have their merits but they are nevertheless inadequate because they do not seriously address questions concerning the root causes of problems, power, and domination. Furthermore, they do not critically scrutinise how the political institutions of current global environmental governance may in fact support broader socio-economic and political developments. This could effectively undermine the supposed goals of global environmental governance institutions and could seriously threaten other social or ecological processes. Informed by critical research on global environmental governance and adding to this literature insight from critical state theory, we develop an understanding of the internationalized state as well as its role and function in globalized capitalism. We illustrate our argument with recent developments in international biodiversity politics. We show that the predominant forms of politics are not very effective with respect to the ongoing erosion of biodiversity. However, the complicated and conflictive political processes within an apparatus of the internationalised state are mainly in line with hegemonic developments and dominant interest, i.e. the increasing valorization of biodiversity and especially of genetic resources.

Performing Counter-Hegemonic Common(s) Senses: Rearticulating Democracy, Community and Forests in Puerto Rico

“…Political ecologists have noted the interrelation between enclosures/dispossessions constitutive of capitalist hegemony (e.g. Brand and Görg 2013;De Angelis 2001;Goldman 1993;Heynen and Robbins 2005;Johnston 2003;Karriem 2013), and struggles that emerge to defend and reproduce commons (Caggiano and De Rosa 2015;Compost and Navarro 2014;D'Alisa, Forno, and Maurano 2015; De Angelis 2012; Brownhill 2004, 2010;Varvarousis and Kallis 2017). These struggles can produce an "uncivil" society that challenges hegemonic ideas, and experiment with new ones (Armiero and D'Alisa 2012).…”

Boundary organizations in regime complexes: a social network profile of IPBES

“…The biodiversity complex includes a multiplicity of institutions, actors and ideas, some compatible but others antagonistic (Koetz et al 2012). At least five inter-connected elemental issue-areas have been identified in the literature as the different facets of global biodiversity governance (Rosendal 2001;Le Prestre 2002;Swanson 2012;Brand and Görg 2013;Morin and Orsini 2014). Each regime that is part of the complex emerged over time, promoted by different actors and embodied in different institutions.…”

The Financialisation of Nature as Crisis Strategy

“…If contentious regulations and discourses prevail or are agreed upon on these terrains, they normally do not have the power to intervene in the competences of stronger international state apparatuses like the WTO 11 . This sectoralisation of politics into national and international policy fields is one mode of political domination, since it secures the incremental character of politics compatible with dominant or hegemonic social relations (Brand/Görg 2013).…”