Northeast Asia Regional Cooperation: China-Japan Implementation of Carbon Emissions Reduction

Table of Contents

Introduction, Alan Richards

Northeast Asia regional Cooperation: China–Japan Implementation of Carbon Emissions Reduction, Changhua Sun Rich

Forest Reserves in Latin America: Environmental Conflict, Regulation Uncertainty, and Forest Stock Response, Eugenio S. A. Bobenrieth

Improving Regimes to Manage Natural Resources: Lessons from an Example of United States–Republic of Korea Pollock Negotiations, Brian Potter

Hydropolitics in Post–Soviet Central Asia: International Environmental Institutions and Water Resource Control, Heather Carlisle

Water Usually Flows Downhill: The Role of Power, Norms, and Domestic Politics in Resolving Transboundary Water-Sharing Conflicts, Paul Williams

Conclusion, Richard Ackerman

Introduction

Few now doubt that successfully managing environmental challenges will be central to public policy in the coming century. Unless the international community can cope with transnational problems such as global warming, destruction of species and tropical rain–forests, depletion of oceanic fish stocks, and increasing water scarcity in arid regions, both domestic and international conflicts may easily arise. To take only one example, for over a decade analysts of Middle Eastern affairs have hinted darkly at the possibility of “water wars” breaking out in that (still) politically volatile region. Books, working papers, and articles on environmental issues as national security problems are proliferating rapidly. The problems of international environmental political economy pose increasingly pressing issues for analysts, policy makers, and citizens.

Such concerns helped to motivate the project, “The Political Economy of International Environmental Cooperation,” sponsored by the Institute on Global Cooperation and Conflict and generously funded by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur foundation. The project supported University of California graduate students writing their Ph.D. dissertations on issues of international environmental cooperation. On concluding their dissertation research, the doctoral candidates presented policy papers at a workshop held in Santa Cruz, California. The student–organized workshop brought together these promising young scholars and policy analysts with various senior members of both the academic and international policy community. Those who remember their own graduate student days can perhaps appreciate the courage and self–confidence of young scholars who designed a workshop in which their own work would be presented to a forum of some of the field's most respected senior analysts. Their papers are collected here in this volume.

A key intellectual theme of the project was the (always difficult, always necessary) marriage of theory and policy. However varied the details of international environmental political economy may be, the core problem is always the same: how to induce self–interested, often myopic, decision makers to “do the right thing,” or to behave in ways that minimize environmental damage and/or optimize the utilization of natural resources in the presence of external constraints. Addressing such problems is difficult enough within a polity; forging the transnational cooperation needed to cope with environmental issues confronts still greater obstacles.

Or does it? Theorizing about international environmental cooperation seems caught between (older) misleading simplicity and (more recent) inconclusive and bewildering complexity. Older theories with origins in the tradition of neo–classical economics stressed such simple concepts as “the tragedy of the commons,” “the capture by vested interests of regulating public bodies,” and “one–shot prisoners' dilemma games.” Political scientists analyzing these issues divided here, as in other applied areas, into “realists” and “liberals” in their views of if, when, and how international cooperation might occur. Both literatures often seemed counsels of despair, implying that cooperation was impossible unless actors were altruistic.

Curmudgeons noted, however, that nations often did cooperate. During the past decade or so, theory has begun to catch up with reality. Game theorists such as Axelrod (1984) and Kreps et. al (1982) showed how cooperation might occur in repeated prisoners' dilemma games; international relations theorists such as Stein (1990) offered syntheses of liberal and realist views; while inter–generational models of resource allocation became increasingly sophisticated, allowing for greater complexity, realism, and diversity of outcomes. The possibilities of international cooperation now seem well–grounded in theory.

But in some respects theory offers us a poisoned chalice. For example, game theory offers such a rich menu of possible outcomes ("too many equilibria with no way to choose,” as Kreps [1990] puts it) that the analyst can often, at best, use the theory as a way to systematize his empirical data, or to tell her story using a certain (game theory) language. We are still far from any straight–forward methodology of translating theory into concrete policy recommendations.

Perhaps this is inevitable, and unsurprising. After all, interactions of multiple actors, with complex, shifting goals in a world of uncertainty and asymmetric information, are inherently complex, path–determined, and situation–specific. Historians have long thought so; social scientists increasingly find that their own theories back them up. Theory helps, but the search for the philosopher's stone that unlocks all problems is likely a doomed, even quixotic, exercise. Indeed, those rules of thumb to which policy makers have long had recourse, have now become theoretically respectable.

We are left, then, with using the insights of modern theory and then trying to steep ourselves in all of the rich detail of a given problem of cooperation. Most of the papers in this volume are in this tradition (although Bobenrieth's is the least so, being primarily an attempt to extend the theory of optimal exploitation of forests in a direction which may yield policy–relevant conclusions). Here, as so often in policy analysis, we are often looking for “win–win” situations.

In particular, analysts and policy makers often seek to find ways to expand the decision space, or, to shift the metaphor, to determine the currency of acceptable side–payments. Actors X and Y may be deadlocked on a particular question (e.g., the division of water in a river basin). However, their relationship, particularly if they are nation–states, is inherently multi–dimensional. It is conceivable that other aspects of X's relationship to Y may induce X to agree with Y on water, if X is suitably compensated (for example, in the national security arena). Only a detailed examination of a particular case can tell us much about the likelihood of striking such “win–win” bargains.

The papers in this volume offer an Aristotelian line–up of earth, fire, air, and water issues. The problems of optimal depletion of forests (Bobenrieth), managing global emissions and related global warming problems (Rich), water negotiations in two different regional settings (Carlisle and Williams), and issues of oceanic fisheries (Potter) all receive close, detailed attention. The volume concludes with an evaluation of their work from the perspective of a World Bank professional on the policy–making process. The result shows how the interaction of theory and empirical material can generate results helpful to policy makers. We hope that such close work between theoretically grounded, empirically rich policy analysts and professional decision–makers will become increasingly frequent in the years ahead. The University of California Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation is committed to promoting such interactions.