Transcript Constitutional Implications of Global Environmental Change

Constitutional Implications of
Global Environmental Change
SHEILA JASANOFF
with
JIM DRATWA
MYANNA LAHSEN
Constitutional Theories
• United States
– Bruce Ackerman, constitutional moments
• International law debates
– post-sovereign order
• European Union
– constitutional convention
• Empire (Hardt and Negri)
• Unwritten constitutionalism
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Non-formal constitutionalism
• Constitutionalism with a small “c”:
– “a form of rule which both empowers a
government to carry out the range of
functions associated with the modern
interventionist state and excludes
arbitrary and despotic forms of rule.”
Neil Walker
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Environment and Constitutionalism
• New coalitions (Lahsen)
– epistemic communities
• New discourses (Dratwa)
– risk society, “unknown unknowns”
– precautionary principle
• Visual strategies (Jasanoff)
– “Earth” in the balance
– “Million globes” campaign of Seattle NION
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Brazilian Climate Change EpiComm
• 1992 Rio Earth Summit instigated by
climate scientists -- who:
• view national policy as too self-seeking and
economist
• favor environmental education and literacy
• identify with IPCC and find Bush policy of
seeking NAS review “insulting”
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Other Views: at the Inter-American
Institute
.
A person ... – from Chile – after nine years of this,
said “There it is! There is the U.S. motive for IAI. I
knew they were up to something, I knew there was a
larger political motive. It took eight years, but now it
has been revealed.” ... Now, I was there from the
word “go.” I know the motives, I know every iota of
thinking behind it. There is no conspiracy. There is no
hidden purpose. There is no political agenda... But it
was never ever perceived that way by the other
players... I suddenly realized: Oh my God, they have
been sitting there ..., these pals of mine, wondering
what devious thing I was up to.
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Constitutional Roles of the Precautionary
Principle
• 5 levels or dimensions
– inherent
– imported: spill-over
– diversely distributed/advocated
– contested
– constituted by-and constitutive of-polities
(e.g., EU)
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Precautionary Principle (PP) and Climate
Change (CC)
• Inherent in any initiative to address anthropogenic
climate change to the extent that scientific
uncertainty is used as a resource to
shape/undermine such initiative.
• Spilling over from other policy-areas such as the
Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety, so that the PP
finds its way into the CC regime (e.g., the COP-9
decision on GM trees used for sinks).
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Precautionary Principle (PP) and Climate
Change (CC)
• Explicitly featured/advocated in some actors'
positions and policies (e.g. by the EU, in
international settings such as COP meetings and in
domestic European climate policies).
• Contested as such and in its instantiations (cf. the
phrase “no regrets” used with very different
meanings by EU and US in 1980s).
• Co-production of the global CC regime, CC
episteme, and [CC] PP.
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Dissension on Kyoto or Other
Precautionary Action
• internationally
• within the EU
– between Aznar’s Spain and European Commission
• within EU member states
– Belgium, with Flanders Region playing a US/Spanish
part
• within the European Commission
– between Commissioners de Palacio and Prodi or
Wallström
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Planet Earth: Image and Imagination
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Politics of Planet Earth
• In the middle of the 20th century, we saw our planet
from space for the first time. Historians may
eventually find that this vision had a greater impact
on thought than did the Copernican revolution of
the 16th century, which upset humans’ self-image
by revealing that the Earth is not the centre of the
universe. From space, we see a small and fragile
ball dominated not by human activity and edifice
but by a pattern of clouds, oceans, greenery and
soils (World Commission of Environment and
Development 1987, 308).
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Erasing Sovereignty
• We are too small and our statecraft too
feeble to be seen by a spacecraft between
the Earth and the Moon. From this vantage
point, our obsession with nationalism is
nowhere in evidence. The Apollo pictures
of the whole Earth conveyed to multitudes
something well known to astronomers: On
the scale of worlds…humans are
inconsequential (Sagan 1994, 5-6).
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Erasing Power: Politics as Ecology
On the grounds for U.S. withdrawal from the Law of
the Sea Convention:
• “The internationalists’ tendency to favor collective
over individual action is combined with the
codifiers’ tendency to wish to see the world in neat
static terms. Above and beyond practical
considerations, there is an aesthetic antipathy to
the ‘disaster’ of non-uniformity, and a general
distrust of the possible benignness of selfregulating, dynamic processes” (Darman 1978).
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Discourses of Resistance
• Restoring the individual
– “The ‘luxury emission’ levels of one US citizen in 1996 were
equal to the ‘survival emissions’ of 19 Indians, 30 Pakistanis,
17 Maldivians, 49 Sri Lankans, 107 Bangladeshis, 134
Bhutanese or 269 Nepalis” (CSE, Green Politics, 2000).
• Equity, economics, ecology
– Clean Development Mechanism  Cheap Development
Mechanism (“the cost of sinks projects in tropical countries
could be as low as US $0.1 per tonne of carbon stored as
against us $100 per tonne of stored carbon for similar
projects in a non-tropical country” (CSE).
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“Life Environmentalism” vs.
Natural Environmentalism
• You talk very little about life, you talk too much
about survival. It is very important to remember
that when the possibilities for life are over, the
possibilities for survival start. And there are
peoples here in Brazil, especially in the Amazon
region, who still live, and these people who still
live don’t want to reach down to the level of
survival (World Commission on Environment and
Development, 1987, 40).
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Other Images, Other Ecologies
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Human Place in Nature
• India’s “ecosystem people”
– must scratch the earth and hope for rains in
order to grow their own food, must gather
wood or dung to cook it, must build their own
huts with bamboo or sticks of sorghum
dabbed with mud and must try to keep out
mosquitoes by engulfing them with smoke
from the cooking hearth. Such people depend
on the natural environments of their own
locality to meet most of their material needs
Gadgil and Guha 1995, 3.
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