Global accord: Environmental challenges and international responses

Abstract

Global Accord is the first holistic assault on a complex set of environmental issues. It provides a much-needed analytical framework for examining how individuals, groups, and nations create environmental dislocations, and how nations can work together to solve ecological problems that cross their borders. The fifteen essays cover theoretical and empirical dimensions, actors and processes, law and economics, and international institutions and systems. Effective management of global environmental problems may become the most significant institutional challenge for the twenty-first century. The purpose of this book - the first in a series of scholarly investigations of global environmental accord - is to develop an integrated approach to interactions between environmental and social systems, and between ecological and decision systems, in order to untangle the connections between human actions and environmental consequences and to improve prospects for concerted global responses to environmental problems. Each chapter highlights the importance of recognizing differences in perspectives and priorities among nations and of articulating norms for management of the global environment.